Shan

This post is number five in the Earth Week 2008 series.  

Shan, here you are at your  Earth Day Festival.  It was your harebrained idea and I brought up every good reason why it couldn't be done by a handful of high school kids in a few short months.  I'm glad you didn't take no for an answer.  It's a toss up which of us was more proud that day when it all came together and really happened.  

After graduation, you became a banana slug, grew your hair long, and went to live in the trees, or so the rumor goes.  A year later, you returned to bless our 2nd Earth Day with your presence.  Look how earthy you'd become!

And what of your harebrained ideas?  Luckily for the rest of us, you've nurtured and expanded them.  You are committed to working for social change and teaching as many others as possible effective strategies for doing so.   

Majoring in community studies, working with the SEC, the CSSC, the LRDP-SSIC, the XYZPDQ...I mean, the Student Environmental Center, the California Student Sustainability Coalition, contributing to the Long Range Development Plan Strategic Student Involvement Committee, and creating a compost and garden plan for the UC Santa Cruz Blueprint for Sustainability. Whew!  How do you keep all of those acronyms straight?  

Most interestingly to me is your work with the Transformative Action Center, an outfit inspired by the methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King whose goal it is to promote creative, non-violent, effective strategies for social change.  You've helped bring a Transformative Action course to several UC campuses so that hundreds of students can learn how to empower themselves and others to change the world.

And when you really want to inspire others, you sing!  (Here's the video.)

Shan, it's a good thing that you are still going strong, because I'm getting tired.  I've spent more time changing diapers than changing the world in the past two years.  But, reading about all you are doing re-inspires me to re-awaken some harebrained ideas of my own...