Straight talking is a first step towards new attitudes and policies, discover Sandy and Caz Hore-Ruthven.

In recent years LFL has turned its attention to 3,500 Afghan refugee children - girls and boys - living in and around Peshawar. As the two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan begin to return home - a process which is expected to take at least two years - LFL aims to expand into Afghanistan itself.

Sixteen years after the world's worst nuclear accident, Kenneth Noble visits the children who are still suffering as a result.

In the dying days of the apartheid era, the inhabitants of Stutterheim, South Africa, took their future into their own hands. William Smook visits a town which has undergone a remarkable transformation.

The aim of Entrepreneurs Associates (EA) is to ‘kick-start a process of social change through entrepreneurship’ and to create stability in Nagaland.

At the age of 23 Diana Patricia Pabón-Ramirez has already devoted more than a decade to tackling the social problems of her Colombian community, Paul Williams reports.

Joanna Giecewicz is an architect and teaches design in the department of architecture of the Warsaw Technical University. She has lived and worked in Vienna and the USA and is a fellow of regional studies at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in the US.

Since we last wrote about Walkerswood, Jamaica, in 1994, its cottage industry has burgeoned into a company with a £2 million turnover. Mary Lean reports, and (below) visits its London showcase, Bamboula restaurant in Brixton.

'Honest conversation' at Nottingham's Partnership Council is a key to urban renewal, Michael Smith discovers:

What makes a society strong? The vitality of its community life, maintains Mike Lowe.