There are seven projects happening this summer in Burlington. Some are continuations/expansions of last summer’s programs, and others are completely new.

The Programs: There are seven basic contiguous programs set to run this summer. Here’s a sampling of four programs:

1. Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative

Last summer, participants worked with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative to bring pellet-stove heating systems to low-income households. They received a grant for $20,000 to buy and install pellet stoves. Over the year, Tom and Beth Tailor have been keeping in touch with/checking up on recipients of the stoves. There are currently 15 different stoves in 2 counties in the state (Addison and Washington).

This summer, they are applying for another grant to expand this project. The program participants will continue the process of bringing pellet stoves to low-income households, and will be ahead of the learning curve, picking up the project after a year of research.

2. Bio-Fuel Feasibility study for Chittenden County

The program leaders received $25,000 in federal money, and $5,000 in local funding. This study will be researching the feasibility of starting a pellet manufacturing co-op in Chittenden County. Tom said that while it’s great to give pellet stoves to low-income people, a whole systems change also means a way to provide jobs. In particular, the manufacturing plant would be aimed at producing grass-based pellets, as a more sustainable pellet than wood.

3.  Passive Community Refrigerator/Freezer

Construction of a passive refrigerator freezer  construction for community use using W(n)IMBY {Why not  In My Back Yard}. The passive community freezer will freeze 2000 two liter soda bottles next winter and use them to keep the freezer cold year round.  It will be made in part out of recycled and natural materials. Construction of eatible landscape, including localavore rabbit warren, and sustainable gardens.

4. Vermont Engineering Summer Camp at UVM

Another aspect of the program involves educating high school students about green engineering. Last summer, Summer of Solutions program participants taught for a week at the Vermont Engineering Summer Program. According to Beth and Tom, this was one of the most fun aspects of the summer, and they are looking to partner as trainers again.

Last year, SoS participants and high school students built a small-scale, working windmill. This summer, a new strand of the engineering camp will focus on the engineering aspects of de-commissioning a nuclear plant.

The other three projects include starting a rabbit colony for meat and yarn, a permaculture garden, and a community garden.

To apply as a participant to Summer of Solutions – Burlington, go here: http://grandaspirations.org/apply/burlington.html

For more information, contact Tom and Beth Tailer at: tbtailer [@] hotmail[.]com

Oregon’s Summer of Solutions program is three years in the making. In the summer of 2008, Nathan and others led a summer program called the Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment. Throughout the summer, the NICE kept in touch with Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities, and at the end of the summer they decided to team up for summer 2009 to run their programs simultaneously on a national scale.

Since then, the NICE has turned into an organization that runs year-round, and the programs have been growing and expanding.

The Projects: This summer, the Summer of Solutions – Corvallis team will be continuing a listening project that has already started. While the team currently working on the listening project finishes it up, new program participants will begin a replica of the listening project in another neighborhood.

Teams of solutionaries will enter specific neighborhoods in Corvallis and conduct a listening project surrounding how solutions for energy efficiency. After the listening has been conducted, the people working on the listening project will provide specific follow-up and support to this neighborhood, at the same time that a new listening project is begun in a different neighborhood in Corvallis.

After this initial follow-up stage is completed, solutionaries will bring interested community leaders together in a forum. Nathan said he’s not quite sure what will come out of these forums, but that’s part of the point. Community members will form groups around their interests that will create community-based solutions for Corvallis.

NICE Projects: The NICE is positioned to run Grand Aspirations programs year-round. Programs that he and his fellow Oregon-ites are moving forward with are designed to be year-long programs that Summer of Solutions participants can plug into.

One really exciting project in particular is the development of a permanent site for the Northwest regional Summer of Solutions. The idea is to get an old abandoned house, school, church, any sort of building, and then fix it up. The building would serve as a model for sustainable living, as well as a space to host people for conferences and gatherings.

The physical space for the NICE building will more likely be in Portland than in Corvallis, but participants who are interested in this particular project would be able to plug in in various ways.

To apply:

As a Coordinator: Go here

As a Participant: Go here

For more information, contact Nathan Jones at nathan [@]thenice[.]org

After two summers of amazing work and programs in the Twin Cities, the TC Summer of Solutions Planning Team is back in business and ready to amplify their already very strong programs!

Programs in the Twin Cities: The TC Summer of Solutions is the first program run, and two of the projects from that very first summer are still maintained.

Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF) is a business that connects home- and business-owners in St. Paul with the resources to weatherize homes and implement very practical energy efficiency strategies to save energy and money. The broad vision of CEF is to reframe the debate about energy and climate change by demonstrating how the average household can play a role in building solutions through community collaboration. First envisioned in early 2008, and is running strong today.

The Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy is a coalition of groups working together to transform the St. Paul Ford Plant, which is slotted to close, into a mixed-use site that would act as an example of how green manufacturing can very positively act as an ecosystem-like community. The manufacturing spaces already existing on the site would be converted to manufacturing solar panels or wind equipment. Within the blueprints for the site are high-density, mixed-use housing, green space, business establishments, and transit systems. The site would be a whole community. Last summer, SoS participants took an integral part in developing a fiscal impact statement, and the project was taken to the St. Paul City Planners in the fall.

These are two programs that have been running for a while, but Twin Cities leaders have told me they have much more up their sleeves for this summer!

Much of the program expansion this summer is in the exciting move out of the Macalester Neighborhood. Program leaders the past two summers benefited greatly from the local community around Macalester College, but the projects of the Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities are meant to be scalable into many different neighborhoods, and have reached a point of stability where that is possible.

However, there are a couple of really new, exciting opportunities that set this summer apart from other summers. A local bike co-op is hoping to implement a bike loan program this summer for those coming from low-income backgrounds to save costs on transportation. There are also several exciting opportunities to collaborate with local urban agriculture/community gardening groups, and the program leaders are excited to expand their focus on Community Gardens this summer.

About the Cities: St. Paul and Minneapolis, MN have grown together since the mid-late 1800s into a center point for urban life in the Midwest. Matt explained that the Twin Cities are the most metropolitan area within 300 miles, and are extremely neighborhood focused.

Jason highlighted the cities as a focal point for immigration to the Midwest – until about the 1970s, that immigration had been largely white, but has become very diverse. Three immigrant populations in particular are highly present in the Twin Cities metro area: East African, Hmong, and Mexican populations thrive within the two cities. The Twin Cities are very bikable, have a (decent?) transportation system, and, in true Minnesota fashion, are a very friendly place to live.

The Planners: Full-time planners for this summer are Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, Matt Kazinka, William Raedy, Jason Rodney, and Ruby Levine. For more detailed information about these wonderful people, check out their bios on our website.

We hope to see you here in June! Apply here to participate in the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions!

If you have any further questions, please email Matt at matt.kazinka@grandaspirations.org

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but fear not, lots of cool new developments have been going down in my absence from the blogosphere.

I have returned triumphantly to announce the 2010 Summer of Solutions National Blog Series!

Each week, the Solutionaries blog will feature a different local program. Blog posts will include interviews with local program leaders, pictures of the towns where the programs will be taking place, and information about the city and projects that you would be working on if you participated in one of our Summer of Solutions programs.

Here’s a list of the programs you’ll be learning about:

Asheville, NC

Austin, TX

Burlington, VT

Cleveland, OH

Corvallis, OR

Dallas, TX

Detroit, MI

Fayetteville, AR

Harrisburg, PA

Iowa City, IA

Santa Fe, NM

Twin Cities, MN

Worcester, MA

To jump start the series, this week we’ll be featuring SoS Twin Cities and Asheville!

The St. Paul Summer of Solutions program is what started it all back in 2008, and the program is looking really strong this year. Yesterday, I sat down and had a very dynamic talk with Timothy, Matt and Jason – all program planners, and all very excited to get their story out there.

Asheville is in North Carolina, at the bottom of the Appalachian range. The program is new this summer, and leaders JC and Tiffany have some really great ideas for development work in their community.

The post on the Twin Cities should be up sometime tomorrow, and the post on Asheville will be up Thursday or Friday. Keep checkin’ Back!

**

In other blogging/web news, you’ll notice that over this week, the face of our site will be changing gradually. Pantelis Korovilas, an amazing graphic designer, has created a logo for us, and we’ll be updating Solutionaries and our website with the fresh new look. This is a project of five months in the making, and I’m really, really excited about seeing it come to fruition!

That’s all for now – I’ll be back tomorrow with a post featuring the Twin Cities!

Over the past ten days, 19 youth activists involved in the Summer of Solutions converged in chilly St. Paul, MN to build a strategy for reshaping our economy from the ground up. We learned how to run an effective summer program dedicated to finding tangible, local solutions to the problems of climate change, the economic downturn, and environmental injustice.

The program began in the summer of 2008 with one program of 20 participants, and over the course of last year grew into 9 programs across the United States. Collectively, there were 150 youth activists involved around the nation.

That was this last summer. Now, we’re looking forward to next summer and the growth it has in store for us.

I have had the amazing experience of working with folks from around the nation over the past 10 days at the Grand Aspirations Winter Leadership Gathering. Grand Aspirations is the organization that facilitates Summer of Solutions programs around the nation. The purpose of the gathering was to bring local Summer of Solutions program planners together to strategize at the national level on how to make our programs effective, how to connect with the communities we live in and train participants.

Participants in Grand Aspirations’ Summer of Solutions program have created businesses around cooperative energy, held community forums called “barn raisings” to raise awareness about energy issues, and have enhanced the power of their own organizations, such as the Northwest Institute for Community Energy. Last summer also saw a huge growth in community gardening and local food projects, listening projects to bring communities together around development issues, and general education and awareness raising.

From an organizational standpoint, this two weeks were absolutely imperative. From the beginning of the gathering, we’ve been coming to a consensus about the model of our action.

Program leaders recruit other youth activists to live and work together for a summer, tackling local problems holistically by defining local solutions. Once implemented, that solution is communicated to other program bases throughout the summer, which then adopt, tweak, or directly implement those solutions.

The community focus of the Summer of Solutions program allows for activists and participants to learn by doing, and also to effect real change in their communities as they go along. Originally designed to keep the momentum of student activism going during the summer months, the program took student activists out of the setting of the campus and into the outside community. And it has never been a solely student-driven program – we accept youth of all lifestyles and callings as participants, and work with core experienced community leaders to make our initiatives as effective as possible.

This work is transformative on both a personal and a community level. At the individual level, we seek to support the person. At the organizational level, we attempt to create structures that are new within old structures of the non-profit that can speak more readily to the outcomes we seek. In other words, we want the organizational structure itself to be visionary, to inspire others into a new way of doing things.

I’ve served many roles in the organization – program planner, participant in a Summer of Solutions program, I’ve been on the Advisory Committee for Grand Aspirations and on the Media and Communications committee – dedicated to telling the story of the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations to the world. Personally, I have always been involved in community action of some kind or another. My father was a State Representative when I was young, and I would help out with his campaign every year – licking envelopes, knocking on doors, walking in parades, that sort of thing.

Before becoming involved in the Summer of Solutions, I just went to school in St. Paul. Now I feel like I’ve become part of the community, that this is really a home, and that this is exactly the place I need to be in my life. Through reflection inspired by these programs, and by facilitated conversations within the Summer of Solutions program, I have really come to find a place for myself within this space. We create solutions on the grassroots level, finding the best partners to work with and making change happen. I like being able to bring communities together, to get interesting people with different perspectives in the same room, working on the same project.

The first step to this kind of community development is to create a strong community within the group. Other than all of our meetings, visioning sessions, and program planning, the other important work that we’ve done this week is to create personal relationships across distance. I already miss my friends from the gathering, but I know that I’ll see them soon. Our paths will cross again, and we will all have grown our programs (and ourselves) into something even more beautiful.

That’s all for now – soon we’ll have some videos to show for our work, so keep on the look out for some more news about what’s going on here. And as the spring progresses, and as we get into super planning phase for local programs. Stay tuned, dear readers!

Well, it was here Monday. But still. Excitement is here, because a whole bunch of organizers who are involved with Grand Aspirations are in St. Paul. People that I’ve only met on conference calls have bodies, who would have thought?

This blog post is going to be a little raggedy, but that’s all right at this point.

A huge theme of the gathering thus far has been communication. How we communicate, what we are doing to change the framing in our own work, and getting to know one another are integral to the process of building community. As a growing organization, we have a lot of practical decisions that we need to make, but we also need to really get to know one another, and to reach some sort of group consensus about what we value and how to take what we value and turn it into some sort of action.

I am really excited to translate this passion for changing the way that we frame and speak to one another into a broader communication system for Grand Aspirations, and I’m excited to tell more of the story of this gathering. Sarah Murphy, a brilliant woman from New Hampshire, has joined us mainly to film the gathering. Video is one of the ways that we will be able to tell this story in a dynamic new way, and I can’t wait to help her go through the footage and choose the good bits and put them together in (many) different videos.

What I’m hoping to get out of the gathering is fairly personal, but what has really been exciting me so far is the potential to really build this organization. We’ve had some amazing people apply to lead programs, and I’m excited to see what comes out of those programs this summer. We’ve also got the awesome opportunity to really iron out some things about the way the organization is working now and into the future.

Building the non-profit – or whatever we are to become – must be done in a way that is reflective of the society that we want to create. That is why organizational development is so important. We want to get things accomplished, but we want to do them in a new way. By initially making changes in the way that we do things as an organization to better fit the world we’ve dreamed as the future, we are providing a model to others who want to do the same kind of transformative work that it will take to create the new energy economy.

I know that I’ve just opened a HUGE can of worms, and I can’t really close it up yet (just because the gathering is still going). I will continue to blog throughout the week, so keep checking back for exciting news related to Grand Aspirations!

During PowerShift 2009, I was lucky enough to be able to speak these words to Representative Markey’s Select Committee on Global Warming:

“The $100,000 Clean Energy Revolving Fund I helped build at Macalester College invests in efficiency projects on campus and puts the savings back into the fund. In its first year, we got a 40% annual return on investment. That’s a bunch of college sophomores with no financial training doing four times better than the stock market – when it’s not collapsing! What would it be like if we harnessed these opportunities, which a green economy provides all across the country?”

In this third post in the series (you can also check out Part 1 and Part 2), I’m going to cut to the chase:

If we want to get real, fundamental, and adequate action taken on climate change, it’s not enough to make it clear that we (even tens of millions of youth in that we), think it’s a good idea.

We have to make it clear that it’s 1. possible, and 2. a good thing all around.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but making that case convincingly can be hard.

A lot of the solutions that are most readily apparent – solar panels on roof-tops, hybrid cars, less consumption – are either way out of the reach of most people (and thus sound elitist), or are framed as a sacrifice. The mentality that a green economy is costly frequently creeps into our own thinking. It’s easy to advocate for spending more money on wind energy electricity or on a super-cool green building because it’s the right thing to do. Scaling up, I’m quite sure a lot of the debates you’ll hear at Copenhagen will revolve around how much wealth various countries should give up for the greater good of a sustainable planet and the well-being of future generations (us and those to come).

Sure it’s right, but is it smart?

I’m not arguing that smart is more important than right, or that we should ever advocate for things that are smart and not right. I’m simply suggesting that if we can’t demonstrate in actual real life that our vision is right AND smart, we’re going to lose.

I hope the insight of how to do so may be helpful as hundreds of youth climate leaders converge on Copenhagen and the struggle for a green economy continues on a thousand campuses and communities.

Read on for what the examples of the Clean Energy Revolving Fund and the Macalester EcoHouse – tales from my own experience that reflect the great work thousands of people across the globe are doing -  have to say about being right and smart.As a freshman at Macalester in 2005, I noticed an ongoing treadmill of students developing and promoting campus sustainability solutions. A lot of these were really good ideas, as summarized in From Neat Ideas to Game Plans, but they tended to follow a predictable pathway. A team of students would get an idea, do research, build support, somehow get the logistics and funding figured out, actually implement the project, and be back to square one. Overall, it tended to emphasize that sustainability means a lot of work, hassle, and money – the task for the truly dedicated. In my mind, that was no way to shift a system.

It struck me that while discussion tends to focus on how costly sustainability is, most of the truly meaningful actions save energy, water, or some other resource, which cut costs. If only we could find a way to channel that savings into a self-sustaining engine that would grow while supporting one project after another after another. Better yet, it would get people thinking “hey this makes sense, why did we never do this before?” and thus unleash the floodgates of creativity and innovation.

I started the Clean Energy Revolving Fund with a couple of other students – we talked with economics professors and managers of other college funds, built support from the student body and academic departments, and hammered through a charter for the fund during long late-night sessions. In retrospect, we made lots of mistakes – not the best financial return mechanism, small horizons (our goal was $100,000 seed funding at a school of 1900 students), and ambiguity in tracking and management. At the time it was heady and innovative.

I drafted the fund’s charter in March 2006, and by the end of April, we had secured $20,000 from the student government – one of the largest single capital requests in its history – and $7,000 from the Environmental Studies Department. In both cases, CERF was recognized as a risk, but a risk with huge potential, and that the alternative was to keep pouring resources into one-time events that did not lead to something greater (like our current energy system one might say). We approached these sources first because we felt that the college administration would be hesitant around such a big idea without commitment from other parties.

In October 2006, we got an additional $40,000 from the administration (later supplemented in late 2007 by another $35,000 for an all-campus lighting retrofit). In May 2006, we held our first meeting of the Clean Energy Revolving Fund (CERF, pronounced “surf”) Board – yeah, it’s the CERF Board – which has students, faculty, staff, and alumni members.

The concrete outcomes of the fund have been great: insulating campus buildings, installing water-saving equipment, and doing a full-campus retrofit of 18,000 four-foot light-bulbs (a $70,000 project with $30,000 annual savings and a roughly 5% impact on Macalester’s energy use). Despite a number of early monitoring and accounting glitches, the fund is growing.

The biggest impact, was the shift in mentality. Students started to think strategically about project impacts, built valuable career skills, and pursued their campus sustainability work along a clear path to success. The administration shifted too – rarely do you hear concerns that it’s too hard, too bold, or too costly anymore. Instead, they look at big ideas for how we revamp our campus (and hopefully soon help surrounding communities to do the same) and ask ‘is it smart?’ The message is no longer ‘please spend resources on this.” It is: “invest here, and get returns in $, sustainability, learning, justice …’ A conversation with our college president hit me with the significance of our strategy. To paraphrase, he said ‘this is the kind of academic and civic engagement opportunity that a school like Macalester would love to support anyway, it’s just a question of prioritizing resources. But here, you’re arguing that you can do it for negative cost. Makes sense.’

In 2007, my friend Asa Diebolt and I wrote a guide for students seeking to build revolving funds, published with the help of AASHE. Since then, dozens of college campuses have used it to launch revolving funds in colleges nationwide. That’s the promise – it works at Macalester. It should work at thousands of other campuses. It should work in communities nationwide (more on that in a future post).

Even before CERF was really on its feet, Macalester student leaders were taking the concept of demonstrating this innovation in a new realm – creating an EcoHouse. High-tech eco-themed buildings had already sprouted up on campuses around the country, most costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. We wanted to start from a different premise – that the greenest building is the one you don’t build. Since 75% of the buildings that will be around in 2050 are already standing (in the US), our greatest impact, we reasoned, would be by finding a cost-effective, replicable, and compelling way to make a green building out of an existing building.

The idea sparked in Fall of 2006, was refined, developed, and advanced through Spring 2007, overhauling the actual building was done in summer 2007, and four students were living in it by Fall 2007. The $50,000 project budget included replacing the decaying roof (from asphalt shingles that leach petrochemicals to a steel roof that lasts twice as long), insulating the building, buying high-efficiency appliances, installing a bathroom solar tube, adding edible forest landscaping (sounds cool, right?), worm composting, and installing a solar hot-water heater on the adjacent garage. While the paybacks for different improvements vary, this was a pretty inexpensive overhaul for a building that was already in need of repair. You can read more about the EcoHouse here.

The EcoHouse is an evolving space – it hosts campus and community tours on how to replicate its success, and students develop new projects around it on an ongoing basis. Particularly, it “looks normal” – serving as a great model for everyday people who are on a budget and don’t want a futuristic house. A recent visitor from another campus was delighted because the big obstacle he was facing was that the administration didn’t want to impose some new-age design on the community. Green doesn’t have to be expensive, unexpected, or even look all that different, it’s the way human systems cycle with broader ecosystems that matter.

For a moment, imagine the contrast if our first step had been to ask Macalester to pay $100,000 per year to fund sustainability projects. Or if we had said we wanted hundreds of thousands for a high-tech green dorm with new-fangled architecture and landscape design. The potential for scale, the mentality of collaboration, and the vision of accessible, pragmatic, and sweeping solutions would all have been much reduced. Through our method, both those things and much more are within the realm of feasibility at Mac. We created the possibility.

A key closing point here: These and many other victories weren’t results of policy. They generated the momentum for policy. Macalester’s innovative sustainability plan, which I highlighted in part 1, was derived from the insights and innovations gained through these and other projects. Innovative implementation isn’t the outcome of bold policy action, it’s what forms the dream and informs the mechanism by which bold policy is created – and it is what gets replicated when bold policy works. It’s what verifies that the bold visions we are pushing for are 1. possible and 2. a good thing all around.

Please join the Summer of Solutions! The youth-led grassroots program is already growing rapidly – we had 1 program in St. Paul, Minnesota – last year it blossomed to nine nationwide. Dozens of grassroots activists have jumped on board the process of “making it happen“, and are generating climate and energy solutions that also build economic opportunity and social justice all across the country. As one of our grassroots leaders wrote last spring as the 2009 wave of solutions was ramping up – this is just the beginning. Its a grassroots movement led by young people who are creating solutions with their communities while building careers growing the green economy. We know you have the solutions, so please join in! If you need even more convincing, you can check out our video by Matt Kazinka on our Get Involved Page.

APPLY HERE to design and lead a Summer of Solutions program in a community you know and love!

Priority deadline is Wednesday, November 11th, so please act fast.

Seeking solutions? We’ll meet you there. Let’s make it happen.

With this as context, I wanted to present a solutionary approach to Saturday the 24th of October 2009.

I used only 35.0% of the power I usually would have in a given day by unplugging everything in my house that I could and riding my friends bike around town.

-Personal energy efficiency is one of the smallest actions we can take, but collectively it can create a huge difference.

- It also puts the responsibility one the first person it should, you. Once we ourselves understand how we can create sustainable lives only then can we start building just and sustainable communities.

I met 3.50 of my neighbors.

-Creating community is one of the most valuable things you can do when working towards collective local solutions to the climate crisis. The first step towards working with anyone is building common ground which can give one the ability to facilitate collective action.

-My favorite ways of doing this are block parties, community meals, or just going to the neighbors and listening to what they have to say.

I dumpster dived 350 cartons of apple juice.

-Free food tastes better!

-This touches on a deeper issue; relying on what is around you to sustain yourself. Build solar panels where it is sunny, eat meat that is reared locally, dumpster dive if every grocery store in your town doesn’t lock their dumpsters.

I planted 35.0 cloves of garlic.

-Grow your own food. Weatherize your home. Gather medicinal plants to help you avoid the swine flu. Do it yourself. Some of the most innovative solutions for healthier and whole communities(and people) have been created by amazing folks just like you.

-A problem is only a solution in costume.

I smiled at least 3500 times!

-What we are working towards should be inspiring, touching, and fun. If it isnt we are doing something wrong.

-No one will join your revolution if you don’t smile.

From Olympia with love,

Tyler

These past five weeks I’ve been in a class called Energy Systems and Climate Change and have gotten to know an incredible amount of amazing people with unique perspectives on the state of the world. Many of them represent people I know outside of school and I usually spend most of my time day dreaming about how I can express my excitement in local solutions to the class. Ive tried the emotion draw of rebuilding communities, I’ve gone at it from an anti-authoritarian perspective by advocating for the elimination of government, and finally I tried talking about social capital and people as a part of complex interlocking systems, as a way to create self-sufficient communities.

But none of it has had its desired effect. The teachers destroy my poetic visions of local economies with local energy production by saying that it is impossible and will get us no where.

That stand has really highlighted the need for concrete examples and solutions to demonstrate the effectiveness of what we are trying to envision.

LETS GO CRAZY!

We have no time, we have negative time, stuff should have been done yesterday!

Summer of Solutions/Grand Aspirations is us. We are it. Our futures are so entwined that one cannot survive without the other! What is my identity? Am I even human anymore, if my soul is somewhere else shouldn’t my body follow? Live our dreams today so we can live them tomorrow. Who wants to sit on a train when you can steer it.

I send you all my love, and a belief that you can do TRULY AMAZING things everyday that empower people to take their lives into their own hands and help in creating the world that we want to live in!

With love from the rainy (but amazing) Pacific Northwest,

A person that cares about everything!