Caring for creation is caring for your neighbor. These are the people drawing clean power from living water and lifting plastic back out of the seas — join us every WE CARE DAY™, monthly on the 25th.
Matthew 25:40 sends us to the least of these — and the call does not stop at people. “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” We were placed in the garden to tend it and to keep it. Caring for creation — the rivers and oceans, the creatures, the very ground a barefoot child walks on — is its own act of kindness, and it belongs in this movement right beside feeding the hungry and sheltering the stranger. These are people and organizations doing exactly that: drawing clean power from moving water without wounding it, and lifting plastic back out of the sea. We shine a light on their work — of all faiths and those kindred souls professing no specific faith other than possessing a heart of compassion.
Clean power from living water
Turbulent builds small vortex turbines that spin clean power out of a modest drop in a river or canal — no dam, no mountain of concrete, no harm to the water that carries it. Their aim is plain: eco-friendly hydropower for remote and off-grid communities everywhere. Power drawn gently from creation and handed to the people who need it most.
ORPC turns the steady pulse of rivers and tides into electricity with turbines shaped like a strand of DNA — taking energy from moving water without damming it, blocking it, or harming the life within it. Their project in Maine’s Cobscook Bay was the first commercial, grid-connected tidal device of its kind in the country, and their river systems now bring clean power to remote villages that once ran on diesel.
GKinetic floats its turbines on the water like small boats, anchored in the current — easy to move, gentle on the river, harming nothing that swims past. From Ireland’s River Slaney they’re raising the country’s first commercial hydrokinetic array, proving that clean power can sit lightly on the land and water it serves.
Lifting plastic back out of the sea
The Ocean Cleanup pulls plastic from the seas and stops more from arriving, planting “Interceptors” in the rivers that carry it there. They’ve already lifted more than 52 million kilograms of trash from the water, and their newest effort aims to cut river-borne ocean plastic by a third across thirty cities by 2030. Tending the waters, one river at a time.
4ocean turns the cleanup into a livelihood — paying crews in Bali, Haiti, and Florida to haul plastic from the water, funded by bracelets made from what they recover. Every bracelet pulls a pound of trash from the ocean. It’s care for creation and care for neighbor woven together: the sea grows cleaner, and families find honest work.
Mercy for the animals
Wildlife SOS rescues India’s abused and captive animals — the sloth bears once forced to “dance,” the leopards, and the elephants beaten and worked for decades. In 2014 they freed Raju, an elephant held fifty years in spiked chains and made to beg in the streets. As his rescuers cut the shackles away, tears rolled down his face — and the people who set him free swear he knew exactly what was happening. Today he lives in peace at their Elephant Conservation and Care Centre. Mercy, extended to the creatures who cannot ask for it themselves.
Care for neighbor, woven with the earth
Heifer International doesn’t hand a family a cup of milk — it gives them the cow. Since 1944 they’ve placed livestock and training with families in poverty across the world, then asked each family to “pass on the gift”: the first female offspring goes to a neighbor, and the kindness multiplies down the generations. Care for the land, the animals, and the people, all at once — a hand up that keeps on giving.
Just up the road in Nampa, Because International makes The Shoe That Grows — an adjustable shoe that expands five sizes and lasts for years, so a child in poverty isn’t left barefoot on disease-ridden ground. They make the shoes where the need is — in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Haiti — so the work itself creates jobs. Health, dignity, and a livelihood, stitched into a single pair of shoes. (Idaho’s own Kim Baker is carrying these shoes to children in Africa — see her effort on our Idaho page.)
The 25th of every month is WE CARE DAY.
One act of kindness. In unison on the 25th. All faiths and people of good will coming together.
Know a person or organization caring for creation — cleaning the oceans, restoring the land, protecting the creatures, drawing clean power without harm? Tell us about them and we’ll shine a light on their work.