Projects
What is a project?
Footprints camps are about addressing a climate-related problem in your community. And we get it — coming up with a project is not the easiest thing in the world. Our goal is to make the process as accessible as possible so you can start making a difference right away. This page can help you understand where to start, and get inspired by previous participants’ projects.
Your project can be an idea, or it can be be an organization
You can be a beginner, or an expert, and somewhere in between
All you need is to be passionate about climate change and want to help your community
What do we focus on?
1) Personal connection
How does your project energize the people in your community to join you? How can you inspire others to work on this project as well? We're not just looking to help you accomplish an individual action; we want to help you be a leader for collective action in your community.
2) Opportunity for impact
However, passion meets reality for all of us at some point. Some problems are extremely complex. Others are relatively smaller in scope. That doesn’t mean both kinds aren’t worthy to address! They absolutely are. What we’re looking for is for you to think through the constraints and opportunities with your issue of choice. What kind of impact can addressing your issue make? What obstacles must be overcome to get there?
3) A focus on climate change
Lastly, we are specifically focused on issues related to climate change. Make sure your project is tied to some aspect of how we can mitigate, adapt to, or even reverse the negative effects of climate change.
Climate action comes in many different forms. What resonates with you?
Explore climate action areas and our participants’ projects
Agriculture & Land Use
Few aspects of climate change are as personal as the food we eat and the land we live on. We work with people and organizations rooted in their communities and passionate about land, water, and other resources critical to life. Explore some of the agriculture, food systems, and land management projects our alumni have developed and then create your own!
Alumni spotlight
Austin Meyer ('22 Colorado) is on a quest to use writing, filmmaking, and improv comedy to help people shift to vegan diets — the most impactful diet choice possible for reducing carbon emissions. This work requires nuance and empathy, reflecting the complex mixture of tradition, identity, and culture that underpins our relationship to food.
Here’s Austin’s story of his week at Footprints in his own words.
Chef Jaimie Oliver is on a mission to teach every family about eating better and living healthier lives. Watch his TED Talk here:
Case study
Based in Kansas, The Land Institute's mission is to move the world to regenerative agriculture — increasing ecosystem health via agriculture, rather than depleting it. One of their many innovations is Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass that can replace traditional wheat. Compared to wheat, Kernza is more drought-resistant, reduces erosion and builds soil health, sequesters more carbon, and requires significantly fewer resources than they yearly tilling and re-planting that annual crops demand. Farmers are getting on board — Kernza was planted on 8 times as many acres in 2021 compared to the year before.
Case study #2
Brianna R. Pagán, PhD, is the Deputy Manager at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC)!
She combined her hobby, career and passion by making a map of climate change impacts to the Western States Endurance Run (WSER) course in the Sierra Nevada foothills in partnership with Footprints, an incubator for climate action and Dirtbags Run. WSER is the oldest 100-mile race in the United States.
Art & Communications
Climate solutions aren’t that helpful if nobody knows about them. But communication goes much deeper than information: it connects people to people, people to place, people to history. The best climate solutions bring people together, and sharing the human experience through self-expression is the best way to do that. At Footprints, we don’t just create solutions; we find the best ways to share them too. How would you share your passion for the world around you?
“It’s about figuring out what your sharpest tool is. When what you do is really coming from the heart — coming from you — then that is where you can move people the most.”
— Zaria Forman
Artist & climate communicator
Alumni spotlight
Guided by his passion for filmmaking, Nemo Cionelo ('21 Colorado) is developing a short film to highlight underserved youth in New Mexico and how running connects and gives them purpose.
This Land is a short film by Faith Briggs that communicates many of the themes related to diversity, inclusivity, and belonging that Nemo is exploring.
Although many of us are passionate outdoor athletes, indoor spaces define much of our lives. With the right forethought and technology, we have the capability to design the built environment to be seamless with the outdoors, a net-positive space that complements and even contributes to the outdoor spaces that make us who we are. Check out these great initiatives that use the outdoors to help inform the indoors.
Built Environment
Alumni spotlight
Hannah Shew ('21 Colorado) developed a campaign to get her university to install a green roof on one of the campus buildings. At camp, she worked through how to communicate the varied benefits of green roofs — the environmental benefits green roofs can have for energy efficiency and pollinator habitat, the economic benefit of decreased energy costs, and the social benefits that exposure to nature and engagement with maintaining the green plants could have for students. She workshopped how to communicate all this to a variety of stakeholders, and after going home, parlayed the work into a job with the university's sustainability office — where she continues to advocate for the project.
Case study
Project URBINAT — Urban Innovative & Inclusive Nature — is a pilot project in Spain that brings together representatives of the local District Municipality, the URBINAT project, technicians, urbanists, academics, local NGOs, and concerned private citizens in collaborative dialogue to make decisions about the project’s urban interventions.
Collectively, they co-select and co-create solutions — such as green walls, alternative currency models like time banks, temporary marketplaces, and urban parks — according to their specific needs, ambitions, and realities on the ground. The aim is nothing less than a collective re-imagining of what the urban space can and should look like in terms of supporting individual, social, and environmental health.
We are lifelong learners at Footprints, and our goal is to help our campers do two things: create robust, community-centered climate projects, and educate people to understand and participate in these projects. We prioritize education because we believe in the future, and the mentors and collaborators involved with Footprints all participate in education in some way.
Education
Case study
“We’re not for profit, we’re for people.”
In Tennessee, Memphis Rox is changing the game. They’ve been called a community center disguised as a climbing gym, and that's just scratching the surface. It’s a vital resource hub, a place of refuge for the community where people from all walks of life come to grow as human beings. No one is turned away because of an inability to pay.
Instead, members who can pay it forward do so to support access for those who can’t, and they get all members involved in some way — through building relationships, mentorship, or volunteerism. They use climbing as social glue to tie together many services like health clinics, job training, tutoring, a food & clothing pantry, and community gardens for their chronically underserved community.
Check out the Climbing Gold podcast episode on Memphis Rox
Watch the short film Soul Deep about Memphis Rox
Alumni spotlight
Luke Foley and Zoe Pritchard (both '22 CO) both tackled climate action through the lens of education.
Luke fine-tuned his small business that provides professional development for teachers focused on sustainability, environmental stewardship, and experiential learning. He is passionate about how this work connects teachers with the places that they can (and should) take their students, and multiplies his impact far beyond his own classroom.
Zoe developed a high-school-level curriculum to teach climate change in a project based, regionally relevant format. Her goal was to ground the curriculum in collective action and the emotional realities of discussing climate change with students. She loves how this work can guide students to feel empowered, informed, and hopeful. She will make the curriculum freely available online, too, so other teachers can spread those feelings as well.
Conversations about climate change often focus on energy because energy production is one of the chief contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. The solution to this problem is a transition from fossil fuel energy to renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal, and the good news is that these technologies already exist and are capable of supplying all the world’s energy needs. We work with runners and organizations to accelerate that transition so we can reduce emissions, clean up air and water, and provide stable and well-paying jobs for millions.
Energy
Case study
Millvale, Pennsylvania
Community Resilience Hubs
Community Resilience Hubs (CRHs) are physical sites where residents can access crucial services during a large-scale emergencies like flooding and heat waves.
In Millvale, PA, local government, emergency services, and community-development nonprofits came together to create a CRH that not only provides services during emergencies, but also addresses local food insecurity and underemployment. Community-based stakeholders collectively developed a vision that included food access and education as well as renewable energy workforce development.
Case study
Honnold Foundation
Community
Sustainable solutions are led by the people who know the community best — community members themselves. The HF supports solutions that are created by communities, for communities.
Forever Partnerships
Even after projects are finished, the HF continues to support partners through capacity building, mentorship, and storytelling, ensuring that partners get the support they need to create long-term, sustainable change.
Catalytic Change
Their partners use solar energy to catalyze holistic sustainable change in their communities — through food sovereignty, education, healthcare, and more — improving social and economic equity while reducing environmental impact.
Business and the economy have provided us with previously-unimaginable skills and opportunities. In order to continue this improvement of the world’s quality of life, we need to radically rethink how the economy works so that it will work for everyone. At Footprints, we help runners develop projects that support their communities as well as their own needs by using business practices that take a holistic view of the economy. How might you create profit while benefiting the world around you?
Industry
Case study
Patagonia
In September 2022, Patagonia hit the world with an eco-bombshell: the company's founder, Yvon Chouinard, and the rest of the Chouinard family were giving the company away. Ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, would irrevocably go to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization.
Both entities were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change.
This move is unprecedented for a company of Patagonia's size and influence, and forces other companies to confront how they will reconcile their own business models with their stated goals of addressing the climate catastrophe.
Patagonia's mantra is "in business to save our home planet" — now, they're putting their entire business where their mouth is.
Case study
Ecovative
Ecovative is in the business of disruption. They pioneered the art and science of growing complete structures with mycelium — the root structures of mushrooms. They up-cycle agricultural byproducts from local farms as feedstock, then coax the mycelium into a variety of products that replace plastics, leather, meat, packaging, and other unsustainable products of industry and factory farming.
They use cutting edge biotechnology to amplify the natural properties of specific mushroom strains — pliability, water resistance, insulation, or tensile strength, for instance — to create an astounding array of mycelial-based, biodegradable, cost-effective products.
How do you grow products out of mycelium, anyway?
As runners, we know all about movement. And it’s not difficult to see that people are in motion around us all the time. Transportation is one of the largest contributors to climate change and air quality issues, but the solutions already exist to allow us to live mobile lives without causing these problems. Explore the work being done by our partners and others to see how you can create a project helping people transport themselves and their goods in climate-friendly ways.
Transportation
Case study
Montgomery County, MD school buses
On a typical school day in Montgomery County, Maryland, school buses use approximately 17,000 gallons of diesel fuel — enough fuel to power about 35 Americans' transportation needs for a whole year. To combat this, a group of local citizens persuaded the school board to replace all of its 326 diesel school buses with electric models.
It's the biggest single-district project in the country to swap combustion-engine school buses for electric vehicles.
Diesel engines account for almost a quarter of the U.S. transportation sector’s annual GHG emissions, and the move will also protect children from diesel fumes, which can trigger asthma and increase the risk of cancer.
The school district can also use the bus batteries and charging stations during the summer to provide the electrical grid with storage capacity. The buses will charge up in the middle of the night when energy demand is low, then sell that power back to the grid.
