Nonprofit Spotlight

It was just last year that Annie Marie Duran was about to make the biggest move of her life. A 19-year-old from Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, Duran was about to move nearly 1,500 miles north to meet her mom in the United States. Her…

There is a network in the United States of food professionals and chefs looking to advance their understanding of food. It’s 40,000 people strong, a number that has grown substantially since the network’s inception in the early 90s. “By…

It’s a snowy January morning at McGhee Tyson Airport. Passengers scramble through the terminal in search of their gates, ignoring the snow resting softly on the tarmac. That is, everyone except Dr. Abigail Blackmon. Gliding back in forth in…

It was the early 1950s. A young man from Lancashire, England found himself in the wild frontier of Guyana, South America, in search of becoming a cowboy. Longhorn cattle and mustang roamed the nearly three-million acre spans, as the…

It’s a classic Christmas story. The children wake up at dawn waiting anxiously at the top of the stairs. They peer over the banister down to the family room below, wondering which from the dozens of brightly wrapped presents they will open…

Inside a bicycle repair shop on North Central Street in Knoxville, Jamesha Fain is hard at work giving a bike a tune-up. “Sometimes you have to start from the beginning with an old bike,” she says. “You have to replace cables, clean…

Every year, thousands of children in the United States fall victim to abuse or neglect. In 2015 alone, that number was estimated to be roughly 683,000, according to a report published earlier this year by the Children’s Bureau of the…

Inside a home in a neighborhood in East Tennessee a single mother struggles to make ends meet while trying to feed her children. Seniors in an affordable housing complex sit in their apartments feeling the financial strain of having to…

Coming from a Lake Wobegon culture of Wisconsin farm families, where bailing hay, cutting timber, and loading trucks was the norm, the idea of “working out” was a foreign concept. The saying, “if you have to ‘work out,’ you aren’t working…

This is the story of how a committed group of people can help a community turn terrible tragedy into hope in a very short period of time.