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Post Independent (John Stroud) Glenwood Springs, CO - CARBONDALE, Colorado — Friends and fellow Colorado Rocky Mountain School juniors Kelsey Bohannon and JJ Worley recently found a way to help needy people around the world, and keep what otherwise would be trash out of area landfills.

Through the Soles4Souls shoe charity, they collected some 500 pairs of used shoes from throughout the Roaring Fork Valley. The shoes will be sent to a warehouse in Nevada, and eventually shipped to villages around the world where people cannot afford to buy shoes themselves.

“I heard about it and it just interested me as a way for people do something for those in need without sending money,” said Bohannon, 16, who lives in Glenwood Springs.

“Some people don't like giving money, because they're not sure what's really going to happen to it,” she said. “There's not much else you can do with used shoes, though. You know someone is going to be wearing them who needs them.”

Worley, also 16, from Carbondale, looks at it as a “one person's trash is another person's treasure” sort of approach to global charity.

“People really do get tired of donating money. This is a way to get rid of something you'd be throwing away anyway, and for a good cause,” she said.

Bohannon and Worley put up flyers around the valley and set up collection boxes at Summit Canyon Mountaineering in Glenwood Springs and at Dos Gringos Burritos in Carbondale.

“They asked me to come empty the box at Summit because it was overflowing,” Bohannon said. “The shoes filled up my car.”

Once they collected all the shoes they realized it would cost $230 to ship them to Nevada, even after the 80 percent charity discount from UPS. So they approached the Aspen Skiing Company, and it covered the shipping cost.

“We didn't even think about the money part of it,” Worley said. “We really want to thank the Skico for helping us out.”

They received some interesting shoes along the way, including some Go-Go boots, a pair of snowboard boots, and ballet slippers.

“Some of them are pretty fancy shoes, and not very used at all,” Bohannon said.

Miser's Mercantile, a local second-hand store, also donated some of the shoes it had in stock, and the American Legion Ladies Auxiliary collected a box of shoes as well.

The students may do another drive in the future, but their collection efforts are done for now. However, Independence Run and Hike, a local running and outdoor gear store, is also a collection location for Soles4Souls.

The store, located in the Gateway Plaza at Highway 133 and Cowen Drive in Carbondale, is collecting “gently worn” footwear and/or monetary donations to help ship the shoes.

The shoes sometimes go to victims of a natural disaster, or who are subject to living in extreme poverty, according to the organization's website, www.giveshoes.org.

“It is estimated that Americans have 1.5 billion pairs of unused shoes lying in their closets,” it notes. “The charity can use each and every one of these pairs to make a tangible difference in someone's life.”

Independence Run and Hike owner Brion After said he is glad to contribute, both in the charitable sense and because of the reduced environmental impact of recycling used shoes.

“We believe in taking care of the land that takes care of us,” he said. “Partnering with Soles4Souls enables the local running and hiking community to be environmental stewards and assist those in need throughout the world.”  jstroud@postindependent.com

For more information on Colorado Rocky Mountain School please contact lraleigh@crms.org

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years. I’ve broken the image (which is quite massive on its own) into a few chunks below, and you can download the whole thing here.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

In terms of Facebook users as a percentage of a nation’s population, small countries like Iceland and Norway lead the way, each of which has over 40% of their populations on the site. Of the larger nations, Canada is on top, with around 34.37% of its 33.6 million citizens using Facebook

For more interesting stats, take a look at TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez’s site CheckFacebook, which maps out some of the site’s most up-to-date demographic data.

CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Buzzpoint

Information provided by CrunchBase

Clearly you dont exist in the online world if you are not on Facebook nowadays!

Shelburne, Vt.

A generation ago, kids received “environmental education” mostly through guided walks at local nature centers. Today’s “education for sustainability” is a global as well as a local phenomenon – a web of collaborative programs leaping over political boundaries, engaging adults as well as children, and bringing the needs of people into the environmental equation.

Shelburne Farms, an environmental education hotbed in northern Vermont, is a good example of the changes. In 1970, after the first Earth Day, the owners of the 1,400-acre estate built on Lake Champlain during the Gilded Age  opened an environmental summer camp.

As it grew, Shelburne Farms began to team up with kindred organizations in Vermont and later across Europe, Central America, and Asia. Its teaching manual, packed with hands-on activities for children, has now been translated into eight languages and is used in 16 countries. Current projects reach into Italy, Hungary, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and China.

A summer visit to Shelburne Farms shows how it practices what it teaches: When families hop aboard a wagon for a tour of the property, the tractor pulling it is powered by 20 percent biodiesel fuel. As the wagon winds its way through the sweeping landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, rows of organic hay lie in a field not mown until after ground-nesting birds hatch their chicks. Forests in the distance are managed to maximize the use of each tree harvested and to ensure that wildlife habitat remains as undisturbed as possible.

Visitors get off at the farm barn, which houses educational centers, offices, a bakery that uses local flour, and furnituremakers that use sustainably grown lumber. In the two-acre courtyard – where children romp among chickens, goats, sheep, and other farm animals – a lunch wagon serves local food on compostable plates made from cornstarch and vegetable oil.

A group of older children move livestock from one pasture to another for rotational grazing and discuss how people still, in a sense, “live off the land.” Other groups of summer campers explore woodland, pond, and shoreline habitats.

Students aren’t the only ones learning about the environment at Shelburne Farms. So are teachers, who come from as far away as Hawaii and Korea. Joe Brooks, director of Community Works, which cosponsors a week-long summer teaching institute here, says that teachers call the experience “life-changing”: “One participant told us this was the first teacher institute she’d attended that talked about what really mattered.”

Mr. Brooks thinks that the host site has much to do with that. “When people come here, they feel they’re part of something bigger,” he says.

The Spannocchia Foundation, which operates a working farm on a family estate in Italy, has looked to Shelburne Farms as a model since the former’s inception in 2003. Spannocchia hosts adult educational groups, offers on-site environmental education for local schools, welcomes agritourists, and conducts organic farming internships.

Erin Cinelli, the foundation’s executive director, has seen a shift in environmental awareness among the people visiting Spannocchia. “Ten years ago, visitors came to Tuscany to see art,” she says. “Now they want to understand what’s going on with agriculture and the environment.”

In February, Spannocchia welcomed New Englanders to a symposium on sustainable local food systems and their role in maintaining the rural landscape and culture.
“Food is a unifying theme,” says Megan Camp, vice president of Shelburne Farms, which has helped develop school programs that connect children with farmers in their communities. Kids learn what foods are available locally, experiment with recipes, conduct taste tests, and help school cafeterias plan menus using local foods.

This level of engagement has its counterpart in the Learning and Ecological Activities Foundation for Children (LEAF), a program started by the municipal government for the town of Nishinomiya, Japan. Students in the city’s public schools receive “ecocards,” which ecofriendly businesses stamp when a purchase is made. After a certain number of stamps, students earn the title “Earth Ranger.” The program brings together children, parents, businesses, and government in a way that affects Nishinomiya’s environmental policies. Businesses “are one of the indispensable sectors needed for a community to pursue sustainability,” says LEAF board member Haruo Soeda.

One of Shelburne Farms’ international partnerships involves helping China deal with the environmental and social consequences of its tremendous economic growth. Factory managers in the industrial province of Guangdong will be trained in resource efficiency and environmental health through a series of workshops conducted by the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) in Montpelier, Vt. The institute, which has enjoyed a relationship with Shelburne Farms since the ISC was founded in 1991, has mobilized civic participation to solve environmental problems in 20 countries around the world.

Recognizing that this community-based model of energy efficiency would be more effective if coupled with enhanced understanding of ecology, the ISC invited Shelburne Farms to implement a plan to train Chinese elementary and middle school teachers in education for sustainability. They also involved South China Normal University, connecting the work it was doing in environmental education with ISC’s energy-efficiency programs. Shelburne Farms has also brought LEAF into the project. The four partners aim to share best practices among educators through visits.

Ms. Camp is excited at the idea of bringing Japan and China together in this project. She sees education for sustainability as giving people a new collaborative lens through which to see the world, with young people in the forefront. “The world is coming to have a more integrated perspective,” she says. “Young people think in a more integrated way than we did.”

George Hamilton, president and cofounder of ISC, agrees. “Kids get it,” he says. “They get thinking about addressing problems, question the ways things have been done, and say, ‘Why can’t we do it this way instead?’ Schools are at the heart of change in communities.”

Even though I shoot my commercial work digitally, I have a big passion for lensless (pinhole) photography. As a labor of love, each month I feature a new pinhole photographer on this page http://chriskeeney.com/photography/pinhole/featured-photographers.html and on my blog.