Other People Who Made a Difference

There are MANY people who have made a difference in addition to those featured in Kate Dudding's CDs.

Here are some other young people who have made a difference.

Below are some outstanding older people that Kate has learned about - often from her friend storyteller Michael McCarty.

If you know of a person who should be added to this collection, please send Kate an email including links to web sites describing the actions of that person.

• February 9, 2016 In the darkest hour of the AIDS epidemic, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of people whose families had abandoned them. Courage, love and the 30-year secret of one little graveyard in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

  Billy, however, is the one who hit her hardest, and the one she remembers most clearly of all. He was one of the youngest she ever cared for, a female impersonator in his early 20s. He was beautiful, she said, perfect and fine-boned. She still has one of Billy's dresses: a tiny, flame-red designer number, intricate as an orchid. It was Billy's mother, she said, who called up to ask how much longer it would be before Billy died and they could get on with their lives.

  
  People always ask her why she wasn't afraid to touch AIDS patients without wearing gloves. "I have no idea," she said. "The thought of being afraid never occurred to me until after I was already deep into the AIDS crisis. I just asked God, 'If this is what you want me to do, just please don't let me or my daughter get it.' And He didn't."

• August 5, 2014 Kentucky State president Raymond Burse is sharing his salary with school's lowest-paid workers.
  
  "I didn't have any examples of it having been done out there and I didn't do it to be an example to anyone else," Raymond Burse says. "I did it to do right by the employees here."

• August 4, 2014 Milly Zantow, of Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, mother of US plastic recycling, dies at age 91.
  
  Milly Zantow recalled visiting the overflowing Sauk County landfill one day in the 1970s, and watching, depressed, as plastic bottles whipped in the wind.

  "I thought, ‘This is ridiculous,'” Zantow says. "‘We can't have this.'”

• March 15, 2012 JK Rowling Drops From Billionaire To Millionaire Due To Charitable Giving
  
  "You have a moral responsibility when you've been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently," Jo Rowling said.