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Classy Awards
Classy Awards
Joy

Meet the 11 outstanding nonprofits that took home this year’s Classy Awards

Each organization has gone above and beyond to make our world a better place.

best nonprofits
All images provided by the Classy Awards, used with permission

Give these organizations all the awards

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Since 2009, the Classy Awards have celebrated nonprofits for their unique approaches to making our world a better place for everyone. Winners are given a platform to amplify their cause and showcase the positive impact of their programs.

This year, we are proud to announce that the Classy Awards have partnered with Upworthy, and we are thrilled to shine a spotlight on the 2023 winners.

From championing gender equality, to massively reducing food waste, to providing trade-based skills training to the neurodivergent community, each organization has made an incredible contribution to the betterment of our world.

Collectively through their efforts, nearly 1.5 million people and animals were served across 34 countries worldwide last year alone. That’s a win in itself.

Check out the 11 winners for 2023 below:


Crisis Text Line

3/11

No matter what crisis a person is facing, they can text HOME to 741741 at any time, from anywhere in the United States, and the Crisis Text Line will match them to a trained volunteer counselor to respond from a secure online platform usually within five minutes or less. The conversation only ends when both agree that the caller is in a “cool,” safe place. Human connection is fostered with a scalable, high-quality and low-cost solution that meets people where they are.

Crisis Text Line has provided over 1,300,000 text conversations to those in need this past year.
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Joy

People born between 1954 and 1965 are thrilled to learn they're not boomers, but 'Gen Jones'

"Whaaat? There's a name for us? I have never felt like a real boomer—or Xer! I feel normal for once!"

Photo credits: Michelle Obama, Montclair Film, Georges Biard

Michelle Obama, Stephen Colbert and Michelle Yeoh are all Gen Jonesers.

The Silent Generation. Baby boomers. Gen X. Millennials. Gen Z. Gen Alpha. Social science and pop culture commentators have spent decades grouping and analyzing the different generations, assigning various qualities, habits and tendencies to each age group.

But some people don’t identify with their generation, or at least these particular categories of them. Those on the cusp between two generations often feel like neither aligns with who they are..

That’s where Generation Jones comes in.

Like the Xennials that straddle Gen X and millennials, Generation Jones are not quite boomers but not quite Gen X. For most of their lives, those born between 1954 and 1965 have been lumped in with the baby boomers, but culturally they’ve never quite fit. They were too young to be involved in the major civil rights, women’s liberation and Vietnam war movements of the 60s, instead witnessing those social upheavals through children’s eyes. But they were also too old to identify with the Gen X latchkey kid angst.

Jonathan Pontell is the television producer, director, and writer who named Generation Jones and explained what made them unique. “We fill the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between the Paris student riots and the anti-globalisation protests, and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged,” he wrote in Politico in 2009.

He also explained why Gen Jonesers make good leaders:

“What makes us Jonesers also makes us uniquely positioned to bring about a new era in international affairs. Our practical idealism was created by witnessing the often unrealistic idealism of the 1960s. And we weren’t engaged in that era’s ideological battles; we were children playing with toys while Boomers argued over issues. Our non-ideological pragmatism allows us to resolve intra-Boomer skirmishes and to bridge that volatile Boomer-GenXer divide. We can lead.”

Many Generation Jonesers have never felt like they had a generational home and are thrilled to learn they actually do have one. Check out how Upworthy readers responded with glee upon discovering they were a part of Gen Jones:

"Thank you! As a definite Gen Jones, I completely relate to this. To young to be a hippy, therefore was never a yuppy, but too old to be Gen X. Gen Jones works just fine."

"I have said for decades that I must be a transitional person into Gen X, because I don’t relate to boomers! I appreciate them, but I am not one of them. I am glad someone finally named my generation!"

"There are definite differences between people born in the 1940s/1950s and those of us born in the early 1960s. Most of us born in the early 1960s do not remember the JFK assassination and we were much too young to participate in Woodstock. The older Boomers were already established in their careers and as homeowners with families in the 1980s when we were in our 20s just starting out and ready to buy our first home. While the older Boomers experienced reasonable mortgage interest rates, the early 1960s Boomers faced mortgage interest rates averaging 14 percent in the 1980s which made it more difficult for us to buy our first home. We definitely need an additional group between Boomers and Gen X, and Generation Jones fits the bill."

"I was born 6 days before 1960…. I’ve felt out of touch with a lot of the boomer life descriptions, and not Gen X enough to fit in there. I’ll take Generation Jones."

"1957 here, with older siblings born before 1950. I definitely did not have the same experience growing up that they had. I feel I can identify a little with Boomers and a little with the Gen X experience, so there’s some overlap. (BTW, Gen X needs to stop claiming that they’re the first to have experienced all the things we grew up with. Kids, you didn’t invent drinking out of the garden hose or playing outside until the streetlights came on. Sheesh!) Glad to be a Joneser."

"Of course there is a difference between people raised in the 1950’s and people raised and coming of age in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Society changed a lot in those three decades."

"This is my generation but I never knew we had a name! The description fits perfectly."

Congrats on finding your people, Gen Jones. It's your time to shine.

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Pop Culture

Couple expecting twins asks folks to come up with the funniest fake names imaginable

These did not disappoint.

Photo credit: Canva

Hey, Mary-Kate and Ashley already worked for one set of twins, didn't it?

Naming a baby isn’t the easiest thing that new parents will experience, and subjecting themselves to the well intentioned, but not so helpful input of others is one of the many aspects that makes the whole process really stressful.

That of course goes double for naming twins.

Everyone has an opinion on how matching, catchy or avant garde twin names should be, but outside opinions are rarely what parents need—especially when they didn’t ask for it. Imagine finally coming up with not one, but two perfect monikers meant to represent the two humans you’re bringing into the word ostensibly for their entire life, and someone completely raining on that parade. Doesn’t sound like new parent bliss.

And that’s why one couple decided to come up with a list of fake twin names to give to any inquiring minds.

Over in the r/namenerds subreddit, the couple shared that Tom and Jerry, Ben and Holly, Charlie and Lola and Ant and Dec had already been jotted down, and asked folks to share their own ideas.

The answers did not disappoint.


Funny twin names
byu/LoadingTrolly innamenerds


Of the celebrity name variety, Mary-Kate and Ashley was the top suggested, followed by Taylor and Travis, Lucy and Desi, Cheech and Chong, Penn and Teller.

Then there were music-inspired choices, like Tu and Pac, Wayne and Garth, Sonny and Cher, Ike and Tina and Pink and Floyd.

Plus a few names based on historical figures, like Antony and Cleopatra and Bonnie and Clyde.

Of the twin names inspired by children’s shows, we had Snoopy and Woodstock, Zack and Cody Phineas and Ferb, Anna and Elsa, He-man and She-Ra Bluey and Bingo Fred & Barney Burt & Ernie, Even a few video game references with Mario & Luigi and Link and Zelda. And of course, Ken and Barbie.

There were quite a few names based on literary icons. Be it authors, like Nora and Robert, Lewis and Carol, Agatha and Christie, Stephen and Kingsley, Jane and Austen, James & Joyce and William and Blake. Or characters like Hansel and Gretel, Jack and Jill, Cinderella and Prince (Charming) ,Thor and Loki, Nancy & Drew, and Romeo and Juliet . For the last one, it was suggested to “feign total ignorance that they’re not related” for added comedic effect.

Next category: Movies/TV shows inspired names, which included Wednesday and Pugsley, Ross and Monica, Bart and Lisa, Cersei and Jaime (yikes!) and Luke and Leia.

“I honestly don’t think anyone would be shocked if I suggested Luke and Leia 🤣 That’s definitely going at the top of the list,” the OP commented.

And from there, things descended into absurdity with suggestions like Easy-Peasy and Lemon-Squeezy, Copy and Paste, Dayquil and Nyquil, Gin & Tonic, Merlot & Chardonnay, Beavis and Butthead (especially if for twin girls).

One last honorable mention goes to the person who shared, “My partner and I always joke that we’d tell everyone they were Yanni & Laurel after that internet ‘they sound the same’ thing that went around in 2020.”

Ultimately, naming twins needs the same kind of considerations that all baby names do, which is to think about the real world implication their name might have beyond childhood. There’s just the added challenge of choosing between complete individuality or by acknowledging the unique sibling bond. No choice is necessarily better or worse than the other.

Regardless, this couple has plenty of hilarious fake names to add to their decoy list. Mission accomplished.

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Science

See what researchers found when they tested a bottle of Fiji Water against a glass of tap water.

Is bottled water REALLY all that bad?

via Free Stock Photos

A young woman drinking bottled water outdoors before exercising.



The Story of Bottled Waterwww.youtube.com

Here are six facts from the video above by The Story of Stuff Project that I'll definitely remember next time I'm tempted to buy bottled water.

1. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water (and not just a little).

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube


A Business Insider column noted that two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States is in individual 16.9-ounce bottles, which comes out to roughly $7.50 per gallon. That's about 2,000 times higher than the cost of a gallon of tap water.

And in an article in 20 Something Finance, G.E. Miller investigated the cost of bottled versus tap water for himself. He found that he could fill 4,787 20-ounce bottles with tap water for only $2.10! So if he paid $1 for a bottled water, he'd be paying 2,279 times the cost of tap.

2. Bottled water could potentially be of lower quality than tap water.

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube

Fiji Water ran an ad campaign that was pretty disparaging about the city of Cleveland. Not a wise move. The city ordered a test of the snooty brand's water and found that Fiji Water contained levels of arsenic that weren't seen in the city's water supply.

How was that possible? Sarah Goodman of the New York Times explains:

" Bottled water manufacturers are not required to disclose as much information as municipal water utilities because of gaps in federal oversight authority. Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA."

3. The amount of bottled water we buy every week in the U.S. alone could circle the globe five times!

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube

That sounded like it just had to be impossible, so we looked into it. Here's what our fact-checkers found:

"According to the video, ' People in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week.' National Geographic says for 2011, bottled water sales hit 9.1 billion gallons (roughly 34 billion liters).

A 'typical' water bottle is a half-liter, so that's about 68 billion bottles per year. Divided by 52 weeks would be a little over 1 billion bottles of water sold per week in the U.S. Because that's based on a smaller 'typical' bottle size, it seems reasonable that a half billion bottles a week could be accurate.

The Earth is about 131.5 million feet around, so yep, half a billion bottles of varying sizes strung end-to-end could circle the Earth five times."

4. Paying for bottled water makes us chumps.

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube

Beverage companies have turned bottled water into a multibillion-dollar industry through a concept known as manufactured demand. Bottled water advertisements used a combination of scare tactics (Tap water bad!) and seduction (From the purest mountain streams EVER!) to reel us in.

Well, we now know their claims about the superior quality of bottled water are mostly bogus. And research shows that anywhere from a quarter to 45% of all bottled water comes from the exact same place as your tap water (which, to reiterate, is so cheap it's almost free).

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube

5. Bottled water is FILTHY.

It takes oil — lots of it — to make plastic bottles. According to the video, the energy in the amount of oil it takes to make the plastic water bottles sold in the U.S. in one year could fuel a million cars. That's not even counting the oil it takes to ship bottled water around the world.

And once we've guzzled our bottled water, up to 80% of the empty bottles end up in landfills or noxious-gas-producing incinerators. The rest is either recycled or shipped to countries like India where poor people without environmental and labor protections have to deal with it.

On top of all that, the process of manufacturing plastic bottles is polluting public water supplies, which makes it easier for bottled water companies to sell us their expensive product.

6. There are 750 million people around the world who don't have access to clean water.

Photo by H2O for Life.

A child dies every minute from a waterborne disease. And for me, that's the core of what makes bottled water so evil.

The video wraps by comparing buying bottled water to smoking while pregnant. That may sound extreme, but after learning everything I just did about the bottled water industry, I can't disagree.

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube

If you're properly disgusted, here are a few ways you can help destroy the bottled water industry:

  1. Don't buy bottled water. Get a reusable water bottle. The savings will add up.
  2. Rally your schools, workplaces, and communities to ban bottled water.
  3. Demand that your city, state, and federal governments invest in better water infrastructure.


This article originally appeared on 5.7.15

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Joy

‘Didn’t qualify for the Olympics’ sports fail videos are even better than the real events

So much more relatable than the actual Olympics.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström/Pexels

Not everyone can be an Olympian.

Watching the Olympics is always an inspiring reminder of the incredible human ability to push the boundaries of excellence and achievement in sports. It can also be a good reminder of the utter inability the vast majority of us have to even come close to the feats those athletes perform.

There's a funny phenomenon with the Olympics where we all become overnight armchair experts in every sport, critiquing diving teams' synchronicity and rock climbers' foot placement and gymnasts' landings as if we have any idea what we're talking about. And there's also the phenomenon where, somewhere in our bodies, we feel like we might actually be able to do backflips on a balance beam or butterfly stroke our way across a pool or run 100 meters in 10 seconds.

Of course, the truth is we can't. It takes years and years of intense training to be able to do what Olympians do, and the rest of us aren't even in the same universe of skill and physical ability as they are. That's where the "didn't quality for the 2024 Olympics" viral video trend comes in, offering a hilariously humbling reality check for us all.

When elite athletes make their sport look easy, it's easy to forget how hard what they do actually is. Seeing people blunder their way through it, though, makes the difficulty painfully clear. So when people started sharing videos of sports fails on social media, tagging them with the captions along the lines of, "Unfortunately didn't qualify for the 2024 Olympic team," it became a hilarious viral celebration of human un-achievement.

For instance, this:


@sky.to.swaggy

surprised they didnt ask me to come out of retirement 🤷‍♀️ If @Simone Biles comments I’ll go back to gymnastics #olympics2024paris #gymnastics #simonebiles


And this:

@bellitabaute

Training for LA 2028!! #2024olympics

And this:

@sweetpotatoes2006

maybe next olympics😢

Sometimes you don't make it because maybe you're just a little too powerful.

@marshalls_life

i gave it my best shot tho! #paris2024 #olympics #fail #fyp


This girl is all of us after watching the diving events, mistakenly thinking we could do some of what they do.

@www.ihaveacrushonyou

maybe next year ! 😪#olympics #iwillbethenextsteelejohnson or #simonebiles

From high jump and pole vault fails to balls and bodies bouncing in ways they aren't supposed to, this trend has people wincing but rolling at the examples of why Olympians are Olympians and the rest of us are the rest of us.

Of course, even Olympic athletes have epic fails of their own sometimes, which only serves to prove how difficult it is to get to their level but and execute their skills perfectly each time. All the more reason to appreciate their talent and hard work and perhaps to be a bit humbler in our critiques from the couch.

Here's to humans who do extraordinary things—and to humans who find humor in all the epic fails it takes to get there.

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Health

'Thank you for believing her': Mechanic makes discovery helping woman afraid of stalker

She was right to trust her instincts.

via Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

A mechanic looks under a woman's car.

A video posted by a mechanic who goes by Tooey’s Garage on TikTok shows why it’s so important to listen to people who fear they are in danger. It’s also a great reminder that when you suspect something creepy is going on, tell someone about it.

It all started when a woman came to Tooey’s Garage because she thought her car had a tracker attached. "The customer stated that she suspected a tracker was in her vehicle and asked if we could take a look,” Tooey captioned the video.

Apple AirTags and Tiles allow people to attach a small tag to their important items (car keys, wallet, luggage, cars, etc.) to track them if they get lost. The tags report back to an app that allows you to find them on a map. If these items are stolen, the owners can make the tag chirp so the thieves know they’re being tracked.

However, people can use these tags for nefarious reasons, such as stalking people by placing them on their cars. This allows them to know wherever their victim may be whenever they leave the house.

airtags, tiles, tracker devideTile tracker devices.via Dennis Sylvester Hurd/Flickr

The woman who came to Tooey’s Garage said she got an alert on her phone that an “unidentifiable tile” was following her around. So Tooey searched the inside of her car for hours and found nothing. Then he put the car up on a rack and searched the underside, where he found a tracker wrapped in duct tape and attached to the vehicle in a magnetic hide-a-key box.

The woman told Tooey that the person she suspected was stalking her had put trackers on other people’s cars as well.

@tooeys.garage

Customer stated that she suspected a tracker was in her vehicle, and asked if we could take a look. We looked inside 1st then put it on a lift once one opened up. The tile tracker was attached under the car in a magnetic key box. #creepy #creeper #stalker #mechanicsoftiktok #mechanic #fypage #gethelp @Life360 @Tile #fixed #life360

“If you feel like someone might be creeping on you and stalking you, maybe see if your local shop can take a look. Hopefully, they won’t think you’re crazy, but it does actually happen,” Tooey said at the end of the video.

People in the video's comments praised the mechanic for taking the woman’s concerns seriously and doing whatever he could to find the tracker. “Y'all are awesome for not only believing her but also helping her!” one commenter wrote. “Thank you for believing her AND being so thorough!” another added.

One commenter made a great point: trackers should be traceable back to the purchaser to prevent stalking. “The owner should be able to have that device tracked back to the purchaser and have them charged with stalking!” they wrote.

Tooey’s video has been seen over 3 million times, and it’s an important warning for people to get their cars looked at immediately if they have even the slightest suspicion that they’re being tracked. It’s also a great example for mechanics to take action if someone comes into their shop looking for a tracker because they could be in great danger.

Kudos to Tooey for going out of his way to help the woman by spending much of his workday trying to locate the tracker. Without his help, the situation could have turned tragic.







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