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Sometimes a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single book. In Kingston, that book is “So You Want To Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo. City residents are reading it as a group called Kingston Reads.

“I called it Depression Soup Kitchen when I first started,” said culinary arts professor Joe Forget, a member of the EOC Alliance local union. “But anti-depression is what I’m really doing.”

In springtime in New York City, palettes of color emerge in rampant beds of tulips in Central Park, fields of bluebells in Brooklyn’s Botanical Garden, and daffodils in backyards in Queens. And then there are...

For more than a decade, teacher Lisa Wood has volunteered to work with students at Bethlehem Middle School twice a week after school in a garden club.

In a crush of color, art teacher John DeMarco spent part of summer 2018 on a bicycle and walking path in Albany County transforming a quiet underpass with paint and imagination. He was chosen in a competitive quest for artists to brighten up a section of the nine-mile Helderberg-Hudson public rail trail.

Most of the time, Chris Pendergast — the retired Northport teacher and longtime ALS patient — speaks through the computer attached to the front of his wheelchair, using his bright blue eyes to stare at a letter and blink.

By night, by weekend, and by evasive minutes and hours here and there, he directs a new program - Collegiate Scholars of Tomorrow - that puts hope and college money into NY 529 College Savings Program bank accounts for third graders across the city.

Laura Macey is very busy these winter weeks. Her high school culinary students are providing food for a 14-school wrestling invitational, and then finger foods and desserts for 200 people at the Schenectady Education...

Students in the town of Guilderland in the Capital Region are making mitten history today as they bring in warm, colorful hand coverings to share with others in need. Two educators set up a fake green fir as a Mitten Tree, and students soon began loading the branches with gloves, hats … and mittens.

Not every student has sufficient clothing to keep out the cold, or nice enough to keep away the sneers. Some families know the knot of not having enough food. And in Morrisville, there is no longer a grocery store. But clothes and food for the taking can be found inside the local high school, thanks to the efforts of concerned teacher Meaghan Palmer. Here in the Morrisville Clothes Closet, students can find donated shirts, pants, coats, new socks and underwear for themselves and their families.