Worth Reading: A New Accounting of Efforts to Improve the Planet

The magazine Good has consulted with “readers, thought leaders, staffers,” and even “the old guy at the bar,” according to the publication, to compile its first list of 100 people, businesses, programs, organizations, and ideas that it says will be “improving the planet and the lives of the people on it.” Among those who made the cut in the Good 100: charity leader Will Allen, the author Dambisa Moyo, and the environmental activist Alex Steffen.

Mr. Allen, winner of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his work with Growing Power, in Milwaukee, is cited for his championship of locally grown food in inner cities.

Mr. Steffen, executive director of the environmentalist nonprofit Web site Worldchanging, is saluted for spreading the word about climate change and because “he was doing this before it was cool, doesn’t care that it is cool now, and will be doing it even when it stops being cool.”

Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides comprehensive social services as well as educational support to youngsters and their families in the New York neighborhood, and KIPP Schools, which runs charter schools in 19 states, were among several education charities and projects to earn entry into the Good 100. Also among their ranks: the Teacher Salary Project, an advocacy effort intended, the magazine says, to “remind a forgetful America how important, overworked, and underpaid our public-school teachers are.”

The Good 100 appears in the magazine’s fall issue and is available online. Go to: http://www.good.is