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Category: innovation

Donna butts — executive director, generations united — focusing on the psycho-social aspects of healthy aging and wellness.

Donna Butts is the Executive Director of Generations United, an organization with a mission to improve the lives of children, youth, and older people through intergenerational collaboration, public policies, and programs for the enduring benefit of all, a position she has held since 1997. For more than 30 years, Ms. Butts has worked tirelessly to promote the well-being of children, youth and older adults through nonprofit organizations across the country and around the world. She began her career in her home state of Oregon as a youth worker with the YWCA, where she worked one-on-one with teens and saw the positive effects of intergenerational programs firsthand.

Ms. Butts has held leadership positions with Covenant House, a New York-based international youth serving organization, and the National 4-H Council. She served as the Executive Director for the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention before taking the helm of Generations United.

An internationally sought-after speaker, author and advocate, Ms. Butts frequently speaks on intergenerational connections, grandparents raising grandchildren and policies effective across the lifespan. Her commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. She has been interviewed on the TODAY Show, National Public Radio and ABC News, and was invited by the United Nations to sit on four expert panels most recently on intergenerational solidarity and social cohesion in preparation for the 2014 20th anniversary of the International Year or the Family.

In 2004, Ms. Butts was honored with the National Council on Aging’s Jack Ossofsky for Leadership, Creativity, and Innovation in Programs and Services for Older Persons. She served as a 2005 delegate to the White House Conference on Aging. A respected author, she has written countless articles, chapters and publications regarding the welfare of children, youth and older adults.

Ms. Butts received her undergraduate degree from Marylhurst College and is a graduate of Stanford University’s Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders. She is a former chair of the board of the International Consortium of Intergenerational Programmes (ICIP) and serves on the board of the Journal of Intergenerational Relationships. She was recognized three years in a row (2012, 2013 and 2014) by The Nonprofit Times as one of the Top 50 most powerful and influential nonprofit executives in the nation.

In 2015, Ms. Butts was named one of the Top 50 Influencers in Aging by Next Avenue. Under her leadership, Generations United received the 2015 Eisner Prize for Excellence in Intergenerational Advocacy. Recently she was honored with one of the 2017 International Federation for Family Development Awards.

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Shorthand, the Australian startup behind a no-code platform that allows publishers and brands to create multimedia stories, has raised $10 million Australian (just under $8 million U.S.) from Fortitude Investment Partners.

CEO Ricky Robinson told me via email that this is Shorthand’s first institutional round of funding, and that the company has been profitable for the past two years.

“We’ve been lucky enough to grow to where we are today through an entirely inbound, organic model that leverages the beautiful content that our customers create in Shorthand to generate leads,” Robinson wrote. “But we’ve been testing other channels with some success and the time is right to ramp up those other marketing initiatives. That’s where we’ll be spending this funding, while also investing heavily in our product to keep Shorthand at the cutting edge of storytelling innovation for the web.”

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The New York Times Apr 09, 2021 17:29:04 IST

Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe. The result, physicists say, suggests that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science.

“This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, who has been working toward this finding for most of his career.

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“If you don’t do both, you’re not going to get very far,” he says. He wants to bring “carbon drawdown” technologies into the conversation with genetically modified trees.

Last year, DeLisi organized a workshop with a team of heavy hitters — Sir Richard Roberts (biochemist, Nobel laureate, and staunch advocate for GMOs), Val Giddings (a geneticist at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation), and researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory — to create solutions, like genetically modifying carbon-hungry trees.

And they are close.

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The fabric is about as bright as the average flat-screen TV. The researchers noted their prototype was also significantly more durable than conventional thin-film flexible displays, making it more suitable for practical use. The performance for most of the display remained stable after 1000 cycles of bending, stretching and pressing, and 100 cycles of washing and drying.

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