credit to plant trees and put in a schoolyard garden. In the US the end result will be that almost all 120,000 schools will be retrofitted to be LEED certified and will have schoolyard vegetable gardens and other sustainable modifications within ten years, as half the US population builds new green homes or modifies existing homes. Because it is open to any school, the program will quickly spread to other countries as well. This program will reduce carbon footprint by millions of tons and will be one of the major methodologies by which the challenge of climate change is met. On the way to this desired result a number of other issues will be tackled. Families will become more connected to their children’s schools by becoming members of their school “Green Team” working toward community-wide actions, which become society-wide solutions. Carefully selected local and national green businesses will become our partners and will be able to use this system to find motivated customers looking for their products or services. Individual classroom teachers and administrators will be better able to communicate with students and parents using our unique technological innovation - specially designed closed and password protected social networks. Students will have a safe way to get on line and chat with friends. Teachers, children and parents will be engaged in planning and moving into our new green future. Although this program is designed to be entirely self-supporting, government programs intended to help families “go green” can use this channel to find their constituents. No other program is tackling this problem yet. We are unique.

Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

The first step in this program is at http://www.climatechangeiselementary.com. This is one way to get schools involved, through a visit by a trained presenter who initiates the climate change discussion at the school and gets families to create Family Sustainability checklists. One of our first jobs is to train additional presenters. Another is to go from state to state training teachers to start this program on their own. Individual schools will eagerly pay for these visits to start the conversation on Climate Change.

The second step is From Seed to Feast™, and pre-beta pages for that website are included below. This is a way to get students, parents and teachers to go to their closed classroom level websites daily. Students will work on keeping their plants alive; parents will work on checking items off their Family Sustainability checklists. These websites will be supported by corporate sponsors, eager to sell green products or services to our highly motivated member families.

$60,000 of the prize money will be used to put From Seed to Feast into Beta, and to test that system. We have solicited the assistance of Yale University Department of Forestry and Environmental Science to assist with the evaluation of the Beta test.

$25,000 will be used to train presenters to go from school to school and to invite teachers from schools in target states (Northern California and Connecticut) to come to training to start on their own. Schools will pay a reasonable fee for this training, so it will become self-supporting for the next tier of states.

$10,000 will be used to create the system for linking family purchases to school accounts.

$5,000 will be used to approach the Corporate Social Responsibility officers at carefully selected companies to offer them an opportunity to participate in this program.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Closed, password-protected social networks for individual elementary classrooms involve a new application of a cutting edge communication technology. These networks are the touchstone for getting students, teachers, and parents involved in green projects such as “From Seed to Feast,” a wintertime digital gardening project that leads to planting actual school-yard gardens in the spring.

The overall project starts with a special day in the school where students, teachers and parents begin to tackle the most important issue of our time, reducing our carbon footprint. This day is funded by the PTA or an educational grant, and can be conducted by one of our trained presenters, or by teachers or parents on the school “green team.” The result is a Family Sustainability Checklist for each family, and a School Sustainability Checklist for the school. Every family is involved. That means 50,000,000 elementary families in the US alone, 1,000,000,000 worldwide.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Dave Finnigan, Project Director, working from 1967-1976 in the highly successful Family Planning programs of Korea and Taiwan, designed complex systems that changed those societies measurably. These included reduced fertility incentives that lowered growth rates from over 3% to stability in a generation. He then spent 30 years visiting over 2,000 elementary schools with the self-esteem program at http://www.jugglingforsuccess.com.

In 2007 Dave was trained by Al Gore to deliver the slide show on which An Inconvenient Truth was based. Those slides form the basis of the school presentations described above, and TCP provides a potential cadre of consultants. http://www.theclimateproject.org/

Internet component of this project suggested by Prof. BJ Fogg, Psychology Department, Stanford University, author of The Psychology of Facebook, world-renowned social networking expert. http://www.bjfogg.com/

Web site development is undertaken by Raspberry Media http://www.raspberrymedia.com/

This project has received input from Gus Speth, Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science http://environment.yale.edu/people/240-James-Gustave-Speth/parent:facult...

Consultant to the project is Professor Penelope Canan, environmental sociologist working on integrated social impact assessment, energy and community development, formerly Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, and expert on 1990s ozone reduction. http://sociology.cos.ucf.edu/faculty.htm