One of the quiet gifts of a life spent moving is the people you meet along the way. Not the ones you plan for, but the ones who just appear: at a dinner table, on a dock, in a conversation that starts about nothing and ends somewhere you didn’t expect.

Mary is one of those people for us.

Karlee met her on St. John, years before there was any talk of a van or a road trip. They spent time sailing the Caribbean together, both of them unsure what came next, both completely certain they were exactly where they were supposed to be in that moment. Later, when Mary’s road trip brought her through Denver, Karlee introduced her to Jesse. Once you know what Mary has been out there doing, it’s hard not to feel like the world could use a few more of her.

43,000 miles in her mother’s old Subaru

From 2016 to 2019, Mary Latham drove 43,000 miles across America. All 50 states. 154 homes. Thousands of conversations with strangers.

She wasn’t chasing adventure for its own sake. She was looking for something specific: stories of human kindness, acts of good that don’t make the news, the everyday moments where people choose each other.

The project was inspired by her mother’s words, that there will always be more good out there if you look for it. Mary took that literally. She loaded up the car and went looking.

What she found, across red states and blue states, in small towns and big cities, in the homes of people who didn’t agree on much of anything, was the same thing over and over: goodness, showing up in the most ordinary places, in the gaps between the headlines.

A road trip that became something much bigger

More Good Today started as a road trip and became a philosophy, a nonprofit, and a book in progress.

Mary has been featured on the Today Show, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Kelly Clarkson Show, and Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, not because she was chasing attention, but because what she’s doing cuts through something. In a moment when it’s easy to believe the world is only getting worse, she went out and proved otherwise. With a Subaru and a voice recorder and an open door.

The stories she collected are being compiled into a book she plans to donate to hospital waiting rooms, the places where people sit and need something to hold onto. That detail says everything you need to know about how Mary thinks.

What travel has a way of doing

After years on the road, we’ve noticed the places are only half of it. You meet people who reframe things, who remind you what’s possible, who are out there doing something so specific and so true to who they are that it makes you want to go be more specific and more true yourself.

Karlee and Mary at Red Rocks wearing More Good shirts
More good, worn literally.

Mary is that kind of person. Her work is a living reminder that goodness is not a passive thing. It has to be sought out, documented, and shared, and the stories worth telling are often the ones nobody thought to look for.

Whether you’re traveling full-time, taking a long trip, or just trying to move through your regular life with more intention, More Good Today is worth paying attention to. Not because it will make you feel better in a soft, surface-level way, but because it will make you look differently at the people around you, at the ordinary moments, at what’s already there.

Go find more good

Mary hasn’t stopped moving. She’s in Paris at the moment, still collecting stories, still available for speaking engagements. Follow along and let her keep showing you how much beauty is sitting in ordinary people.

Her message matters more now than it did when she started. Looking for the good, and letting yourself feel connected to it, does more than it sounds like it does. It feeds you. It keeps you going. I look up to Mary, and I’m proud to call her my friend. — Karlee