The Wendy's shift manager is headed to Yale

Good morning, friends.

Today's issue opens with a shift manager at a Cape Cod Wendy's who is packing for Yale. It ends with a woman in Milwaukee leaving handwritten love letters in coffee shops for strangers to find. In between, five baby birds, a boy who joined the team he loved, a Colombian village that changed its mind about a giant bird, and a California creek that is teaching young salmon how to grow.

We are glad you're here.

Somewhere in Illinois this week, a woman handed a stranger one of her kidneys. She had not planned it. She saw a family's Facebook post and, before she had finished reading, she was in. Her reasoning was simple. You only need one to live. So she had a spare.

That phrase has stuck with me all week. A spare.

Most of us do not walk around thinking of ourselves as people with extras. We measure the day in what we are short of. Time. Sleep. Patience. The margin between the bank balance and the bills. We move through our lives as if we have just barely enough, and any small ask is one ask too many.

But something shifts the moment you start counting the other way. Not what is missing, but what is already excess. The extra chair at the table. The hour after dinner nobody has claimed. The bag of groceries you meant to donate and forgot to. The bench in your yard nobody sits on. The thousand small competencies you barely notice you have, because they came so easily to you that you assume they must come easily to everyone.

There is more slack in the average life than we admit. Not because we are wealthy, but because we are alive and paying attention. The man who runs the neighborhood tree-clearing crew after a storm did not become a hero. He noticed he had a chainsaw and a truck and a Saturday. The woman who leaves handwritten notes at coffee shops across her city did not enroll in a program. She noticed she had pens and time and a small kind impulse she could act on.

Today, try this. Instead of asking what you have to do, ask what you have. Not what you own. What you have available. An hour. A skill. A second chair. A spare.

Then ask who could use it.

Thalles DeSouza's story does not start where you would expect it to end.

He grew up in a neighborhood outside Rio de Janeiro after losing both parents. He lived on the streets. He learned young how quickly a night can turn sideways when the shooting starts. He and what remained of his family made it to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and while he finished high school, he took a job at a local Wendy's.

That is where the shape of his life started to bend.

He was, by every account, an unusually good employee. Reliable. Warm with the crew. The kind of teenager who ends up running the shift because everyone else stops arguing when he shows up. By senior year he was a shift manager.

His bosses, Usama El-Sehrawey and the late Ernest Smily, noticed something they wanted to invest in. They told him they would pay for community college. He said yes.

Three years at Cape Cod Community College turned into an application season nobody in his old neighborhood would have imagined for him. This May, he got the letter. Yale. Full ride.

He is 23. He is going to one of the most selective universities in the country because two Wendy's owners on Cape Cod decided a good kid deserved a shot, and because he was the kind of good kid who took it.

"That's Wendy's culture," Terry Smily, Ernest's son, said after the news broke. "Dave always said: give something back."

Ernest Smily has since passed away. Thalles thinks about him constantly.

Source: Good News Network

A boy who loved Notre Dame just joined the team

Lucas is 15, and this summer he signed with Notre Dame football.

Not as a player. As a teammate.

Through Team IMPACT, a program that pairs kids facing serious health challenges with college and high school sports teams, Lucas officially joined the Fighting Irish, with head coach Marcus Freeman standing next to him at the signing table.

Lucas was born at 26 weeks and weighed one pound. His parents were told he might never walk or talk. He has cerebral palsy. He had surgery in December and a month of inpatient rehab after it. He is still working, hard, on all of it.

He also, now, has a locker room full of brothers. His long-term dream is to become a Notre Dame usher, the way his grandfather John Dewey was.

He did not get to visit the team. He joined it.

Source: WNDU (South Bend). Location: South Bend, Indiana.

Five secretarybird chicks, all at once

For the first time in its 95-year history, Chester Zoo in England has hatched a secretarybird. And then another. And then three more.

Five chicks. All at once. All healthy. All from a single pair named John and Jolene, who arrived at Chester as part of an international rescue effort to keep one of Africa's rarest raptors from disappearing.

Secretarybirds are the strange, gorgeous, snake-hunting birds you have probably seen a photo of and forgotten. Nearly four feet tall on legs like a heron, with a black quill spray behind their heads. Perhaps 6,700 remain in the wild. In the entire European breeding program, there are 79 birds. In the past year, only three chicks had hatched elsewhere.

Five in one clutch, in one zoo, is not a small win. It is the kind of moment conservationists write down carefully so they can copy exactly what worked.

Source: Good News Network. Location: Chester, United Kingdom.

A Colombian village made peace with the king of the Andes

In a mountain village in Colombia where farmers once shot at condors on sight, a former enemy of the birds now runs the effort to protect them.

The Andean condor is Colombia's national bird. It is also critically endangered there, with somewhere between 150 and 300 left in the whole country. For decades, condors and páramo farmers were in open conflict. The birds sometimes preyed on newborn livestock. The farmers responded the way people usually respond.

Then a local woman named Torres started learning what condors actually do for the ecosystem she farms in. She teamed up with a Colombian conservation biologist, Fernando Castro. Slowly, and then all at once, she started bringing her neighbors along.

Their village has become one of the safest places for a wild condor in the country. Three young captive-bred condors named Rafiki, Wayra, and Ámbar are being prepared for release into their skies by the end of 2027.

Source: Mongabay. Location: Andean páramo, Colombia.

Along California's Redwood Coast, biologists have spent more than a decade undoing the damage a long-gone lumber mill did to Prairie Creek, one of the last refuges for California Coastal Chinook, Northern California steelhead, and coho salmon. Coho numbers dropped 90 percent in the past century. The recovery had been painfully slow.

Then researchers at NOAA Fisheries and their partners reconnected the creek to its floodplain. They restored the wetlands, the side channels, the slow pools: all the messy shallow places young fish need to feed and hide.

The results, tagged and tracked by biologists from Cal Poly Humboldt, are quietly remarkable. Juvenile coho in the restored sections are growing up to twice as fast as fish in the main channel. And more of them are surviving the ocean and returning home. The 2023 cohort's return rate more than doubled, from about 1 percent to 2.6 percent.

The lesson at Prairie Creek is deceptively humble. Sometimes you do not need a new idea. You need to give a place back the room to do what it already knew how to do.

Source: Good News Network, citing NOAA Fisheries and Cal Poly Humboldt. Location: Humboldt County, California.

This is where we feature a book, product, or small business we genuinely think you will love. Today the slot is open, and we're keeping it that way until something fits.

If you make something a Great News Day reader would want (a book, a nonprofit, a small brand a friend would recommend to a friend), we would love to hear from you. Reply to this email and tell us about it.

Somewhere in Milwaukee this morning, a stranger is going to reach into a little free library or set down a coffee and find a colorful envelope with a handwritten note inside.

It might say, "Hello, stranger. May you have happiness here and now."

It will be signed MKE Love Letter, with two small hearts on the back.

Katrina Lord has been leaving these letters around Milwaukee since 2016. She has written more than a thousand. Some she posts to her Instagram. Some vanish into strangers' pockets and are never seen again. All of them exist because she decided one day that a city could use a little more unexpected joy, and she happened to own pens.

She recommends, if you would like to try it yourself, that you start small. Write one. Leave it somewhere kind. See what happens.

Source: WUWM (Milwaukee's NPR).