This is a weekly newsletter called Quiet Good Of The Week. It's about small, genuine acts of kindness out in the real world. Each issue has 5 short write-ups of real kindness news stories, plus one "kindness suggestion of the week." If someone forwarded you this email, sign up here. If you're already signed up, share it with others.
Two stories in this week's issue are about people spending their nights watching over animals they'll never really know. Two more are about people who showed up in a moment nobody planned for. And one is about a raccoon who didn't do anything except walk funny and become beloved, but generated $13,000 for a food bank in the process, so. That one counts.
This week's quiet good idea
Go outside somewhere you usually just pass through — a trail, a beach, a park, a stretch of sidewalk — and spend five minutes picking up whatever's on the ground. No gear required, no organizing required. Five minutes is genuinely enough. The volunteers walking eight kilometers of beach in the Philippines every night to guard turtle eggs probably didn't start there either.
She'd only learned to swim a few years ago.
📷 Liu Defang (left) wades in to reach a man struggling in the water in Suixi County, China. Photo: Good News Network / police footage
Liu Defang is 71, retired, a yoga and fitness regular, and she only picked up swimming a few years ago. Last month, she was chatting with friends near a bridge in Suixi County, Anhui Province, China, when she heard shouting. A man in the water below was in trouble. She went in. Someone threw her a life preserver. She reached the struggling man, held on, and got him to shore with help from bystanders. Then she tried to leave before anyone could make a fuss. When asked about it afterward: "It was not a big deal for me."
On this one, at least, they were on the same side
📷 Kids from a local Scouting group join Rev. John Jackman at Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, NC, marking another round of debt retired through the Debt Jubilee Project. Photo: NPR / KFF Health News — Allison Lee Isley\
Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has been quietly buying up and canceling its neighbors' medical debt. The notable detail: the congregation includes people who vote on opposite sides of pretty much everything else. NPR spent time with them this summer trying to understand why this, specifically, brought them together, and the answer was kind of unremarkable in the best way: nobody checks a patient's politics before they send the bill. The church's Debt Jubilee Project has now run multiple rounds. Confetti at the celebration. Debt gone.
Bamboo bridges, and the crabs know the way
📷 Mangrove land crabs cross during their annual migration at Taijiang National Park, Taiwan. Photo: Good News Network
Every summer, thousands of mangrove land crabs in Taiwan migrate from the interior to the coast to lay their eggs, a route that now runs straight through roads built over the past 60 years of development. Volunteers near Taijiang National Park started building them small bridges out of bamboo. They also coordinate with the park to temporarily close roads when crabs are actively crossing. This year: 10,000 crabs observed completing the migration, double the number from the previous year. Park director Chen Jun-shan put it simply. "If you protect the land crabs, the entire coastal forest belt can be protected." Bamboo. Twice as many crabs. That math holds.
Eight kilometers, five shifts, all night
📷 A sea turtle makes its way to the water along the coast of Palawan, Philippines. Photo: Dale de Vera, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Unsplash — representative photo
In San Vicente, Palawan, a team of volunteers with LAMAVE, the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines, patrols more than eight kilometers of beach every night during sea turtle nesting season, in five rotating shifts. The main thing they're doing is keeping stray dogs away from the nests; left unprotected, dogs find and destroy nearly every egg. With the patrol in place, hatchery success rates reach about 75%. Jerald Mahusay started as a patroller in 2023 and was promoted to patrol head this year. That's it. Eight kilometers, five shifts, every night, because the turtles don't nest on a schedule.
A raccoon named Jimothy raised $13,000 for a food bank
You may have already heard of Jimothy, a raccoon in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood with a rare spinal condition that makes him walk in a distinctive waddle. He became a neighborhood fixture: murals, tattoos, at least one video game. Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward painted his portrait and auctioned it off, pledging 100% of proceeds to the Ballard Food Bank. The winning bid: $6,543. Amazon matched it. Total raised for the food bank: over $13,000. Ward's announcement afterward: "Thanks to an awesome auction winner and to the power of community and in gratitude to Jimothy." A raccoon with a bad back and $13,000 for people who needed groceries. Jimothy didn't do anything and he helped anyway.
Five this week. Talk soon.
— Matt