Thursday, October 2, 2014

WRITING A PITCH STATEMENT (FICTION WRITING)

PITCH STATEMENT:  My Novel theme in a single sentence. 

When writing non-fiction, essay, journalism, it is easy to answer when asked, "What are you writing about?"  I could just repeat my Thesis Statement using two easy formulas: Aristotle's 3 part Minor Premise, Major Premise, and Conclusion; or an abbreviated Toulmin method of Warrant, Support, and Claim. And journalism requires that the first 37 words answer who, what, where, and when.

But what about Fiction? How do I cut away the side-stories and get straight to the main plot?  Here's an exercise I did that helped me to do just that. This is a process, as my WIP (Work in Progress) is in progression from a Nanowrimo draft to a first draft. 

Within the first ten pages of her non-fiction book Goosing the Write Brain, A Storyteller's Toolkit,  Chris Rogers, Author and Writing Instructor challenges the reader to state their idea in twenty-five words or less.  She advises to create a "one-sentence concept" which defines the character, goal, and conflict.  Rogers provides a detailed exercise which is easily followed.

Then I started brain-storming.  I started writing by hand, with a cup of morning joe and a spiral notebook.  I wrote three pages of various statements (some of which are repeated below). Many were the same story with different words. I set it aside for a while, came back to it. Wrote some more.  Set it aside again.  Reviewed again. Wrote some more...then rinse. Repeat. You get the idea.

Meanwhile, I pick the best one to date, and USE IT! When someone asks what my book is about, I have a one sentence answer (though just try to stop me there...).

Second, I put it out there. On social media, in conversations, at writing groups, workshops and write-ins (you know the drill, tell us your name and what you're working on).  I'm observing how people react to it, making tweaks, and repeating again. 

In doing this, I have discovered another very helpful and motivating advantage from this process.  With this concise, focused, oft-repeated statement on my mind, I am always aware of the main story line as I write.  Even if I am in the middle of an intense sub-plot related scene, the Pitch statement is unconsciously guiding me to remain focused and true to my main story. 

I have also found this useful on a smaller scale, too.  I started using this formula in my first re-write, one for each Part and Chapter, and even when writing Scenes. 

This is a sample of some of the pitch statements I came up with for my WIP, "GUAXU" (working title).  My protagonist has a goal, BUT there is a conflict that must be overcome.

An enchanted Meso-American princess with a cursed destiny wants to free her people from their wandering existence, but must first battle the witch who controls the tribes sustainability.

 The princess of a pre-historic clan tries to overcome a cursed destiny and free her people from a dependent existence, but she must first outwit a powerful and controlling witch.
A predestined Meso-American Princess of hunter-gatherers, sees agrarianism as the sustainable future of her clan; but, she must first outwit the  powerful, controlling witch, who refuses to release the secret magic of the seed.

In Meso-America, a princess envisions an agrarian existence for her people; but, she must first outwit and battle a powerful witch for the secrets of the seeds. 

A tribal princess in Meso-America envisions agrarian sustainability for her hunter-gatherer clan, but must first overcome the dictatorship of a powerful witch.

In early Meso-America an enchanted girl wants to free her people from their hunter-gatherer existence, but must fight a powerful witch.

An orphaned girl raised by a Meso-American tribe dreams of an agrarian society, but must overcome her destiny and outwit a powerful witch.

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Giving Thanks to Nanowrimo, Happy Writing!  Tell me YOUR experiences, processes and ideas with Pitch Statements!  And while you're here, join the Green Association for Sustainability to help promote and support Social Sustainability through the Arts. 

AG

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Tarot Reading: What is My Character's Name? Rebekkah



I used the three card day spread:  The Heirophant, card Five of the Major Aracana, landed upright in space one.  Space two was filled by  the Two of Wands, signifying the task and flanking left of cards I One and Three, Three being “the solution”.  The final, powerful twenty-first major arcana card of The World divined this third important spot.   

The “situation” depicted by the Heirophant, signifies spirituality or divine wisdom in a traditional sense.  In a story, it may represent a teacher, psychologist, priest.  It also signifies a gatekeeper of some sort.  It could be of a material item or an ethereal nature,  however the totality of cards tend towards materialism.  In some way, she holds the “keys”.  The kneeling monks wear robes of roses and lillies, representing passion and purity. 

This is verified by the third card, the solution: The World. As the twenty-first (last) Major Arcana card, represents wisdom and self-enlightenment. The dancer in the center is naked.  She dances a neverending cosmic dance in the center of an expanding universe.  She is a key-player in a never-ending story.

The Two of Wands, “the task”,  implies she is Mistress of her dominion, and literally holds the world in the palm of her hands. Again, the staffs are ornate with roses and lillies, verifying her passion and purity.

Passion and purity, being shown twice appears as a significant conflict with this character. 



Name ideas:

These names were mentioned specifically in history/mythology, which in the combination I felt may be applicable:  Hermes, Aphrodite, Salmacis, Elusinia, Persephone, Hades. Perhaps some alternatives or anagrams.  Also, these are characteristics/occupations/passions that may be relevant to your character, it might inspire a name from someone with same qualities:   a teacher, psychologist, priest. A gatekeeper of some sort.

A sacred promise, obligation, vow. Success. Blessings. Passion, purity, a dancer, a champion, a nudist, a baby, a reincarnated soul.

These Archetypes are associated with this reading:  The Amazon, The Anima/Animus, the artist, the creator, the destroyer, the Divine child, the Fates, the Self, the Shaman, the Visionary.

Note:  One source says, “When the World card appears…plan for a book tour!  Seriously, congratulations!  




The Green Association for Sustainability

Monday, September 1, 2014

P4P: Examining Physicians Pay for Performance paradigms

Pay-for-Performance among Healthcare Professionals: A Mathematical and Comparative AnalysisA statement is proposed in the form of a factual claim:
Pay for performance systems are effective tools for improving quality, morale, and organizational effectiveness.

Quick definitive rhetoric in supportive of or hostile to such a claim is a one way trip towards making waste with a hasty generalization. Dependent factors include the amount of artificial economics being infused into the field. The compensation of employees is often considered only in bottom line terms: Labor is purchased as any other commodity, and wages fluctuate according to Adam Smith-type free market forces, depending upon demand and supply economics. Compensation, to the detriment of many employers, is often considered only as a cost of doing business. For those administrators who have begun to see employee packages as an essential human relations tool, compensation is an important link in the chain of capitalism: Compensation promotes or dissuades production; the level of production promotes or dissuades capital; the amount of capital promotes or dissuades the corporate economy; the corporate economy promotes or dissuades the organizational ability to recompense; worker compensation promotes or dissuades production…and so on.
From a purely logical and mathematical perspective, these dependent factors would create a normal regression analysis equation in the form:

Where βx²+βx represents the dependent variables affecting pay structure as outlined above, and represents the average base pay (Y-intercept). This polynomial is recognized as a parabola, with beta amounts reaching a peak positive or negative Y value. In other words, the value for peak performance is not a straight line in which the greater the pay, the better the performance; yet rather is a parabolic curve for which at some point, increased performance is no longer enhanced by greater pay, but rather decreases in quality. This can be the result of many different variables, including a larger patient base, less time spent per patient, and abuse of tests and procedures for financial gain.
Issues surrounding pay structures of the healthcare profession are inherently complex, and becoming even more so as the healthcare crisis in America continues to deteriorate. According to the former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, George Lundberg, M.D., JAMA, the economics of the healthcare industry cannot be equally compared to manufacturing or even other service industries because of the amount of artificial economics infused into the US healthcare system. Although some healthcare industries are more vulnerable than others to artificial economic factors, most healthcare economies have been affected in some way by managed care, government intervention, technological growth, and a fluctuating labor market (Lundberg 2003). Imperative and life-saving services have been eliminated as government funds are relinquished for other political efforts, particularly the military-industrial complex.

While patriots may think of this as part of the sacrifice and duty of wartime, which appears as a perpetual condition of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century, especially in regards to the continuing post 9-11 Middle East conflicts, giving one’s life for their country should not involve a tortuous lack of medical care and slow death by illness for our own citizens. We blow life-sustaining breath and continue compressions on foreign lands as we watch our own people flat-line in the name of Caspian Sea hegemony theories, oil, and the fear of terrorism.

Healthcare systems as an endeavor into capitalism have been walking a fine line since the introduction of medical insurance in the early 20th century. To address the factual claim regarding the viability of pay for performance compensation systems, I turned to the classic sociological and communication literature of two 20th century philosophers and academics, Abraham Maslow and Max Weber. Both are icons in the field of motivation and the human condition. Consonance and dissonance of traditional and personal belief systems are weaved throughout both of their themes: For example, performance expectancies of professional knowledge, abilities and skills will create dissonance in an employee who is first concerned with the needs and safety of family; yet, a performance bonus would be consonant with the employee’s fourth-rung esteem needs. Max Weber’s wrote that the Protestant work ethics and penchant for thriftiness are in consonance with successful capitalism models; yet work for the purpose of earning riches is dissonant to these same Protestant ethics. Weber’s infamous work in the area of bureaucratic management bring consonance to the management theories between the traditional dissonance of public and private organizations. They are, claims Weber, one and the same.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs


Four common reasons bring people to enter the healthcare profession. Among these include the noble motive of a genuine quest to take care of people; and, less commonly, to reap the financial rewards traditionally associated with the industry and expanded by the massive technological advances of the 20th century.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs requires that human survival needs are necessary before any other human need can be fulfilled. The first level of Maslow’s pyramidal hierarchy is that of physiological needs. It is the base of the pyramid, the largest, most important human need and all others are built upon these physiological needs. Following closely are the “Safety Needs”. Both of these base and basic human needs are controlled to some extent by the employer. The employee’s first quest in securing employment will be to seek out an organization that can provide for the physiologic needs, and secondly, that will provide some semblance of security. Too, healthcare professionals realize that there is money to be made in this industry, as the technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries have improved the odds of making a good living in the healthcare field have increased dimensionally. But Maslow is quick to point out that although money is essential to survival and safety needs, it is not a panacea to a fulfilling and successful career and in consequence, to the issue of motivation of workers through their compensation—more specifically, through their paycheck.

Prior to Maslow’s first publication of his “needs” theory greater than 50 years ago,, motivation theory focused on specific, sustaining basic factors such as biology, achievement, or power to explain what sustains human behavior . Abraham Maslow, a social scientist and academic, synthesized a large body of research regarding human motivation into twp groupings of 8 needs. The groups were titled “growth needs” and “deficiency needs”. Deficiency needs are at the base of the hierarchy, and each need must be met before advancing to the next (Huitt 2003)

The growth needs reveal characteristics such as being problem-focused; incorporating an ongoing freshness of appreciation of life, a concern about personal growth, and the ability to have peak experiences. These characteristics were differentiated into the following four needs to top the pyramidal structure

Over the past 50 years, scientist and academics to continue to cite Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as support for a number of social theories; so much so, that the Hierarchy of Needs can be inferred as generally accepted social theory. Maslow clearly shows us that the amount of pay a person receives is only motivating to a certain degree, and the affect that money will have on ones life continues to increase, but more slowly—the amount of change that more money will make in motivating an employee’s life is relevant to the employee’s physiologic needs. The amount of performance that the employer receives (dependent y factor) in return for his investment in larger pay (independent x factor) minimizes as the physiological needs of the employee are met, creating an asymptotic relationship correlating the amount of money an employer pays to the less the measurable increase in job performance.

Max Weber and the economics of capitalism
 
Max Weber earned his esteemed reputation when he published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a volume that economics specialist David Landes describes as “the most influential and provocative essays ever written” on the social sciences. Weber’s thesis was based on the warrant that Protestantism promoted the rise of modern capitalism, not by encouraging prosperity or invention, but by defining and sanctioning the everyday behaviors ingrained in Protestantism that were conducive to successful business. Weber began by affirming the underlying Protestant doctrine of predestination. Although belief in predestination did not succeed two generations, this dogma was “converted into a secular code of behavior: hard work, honesty, seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time” …both lent us by God (Landes 1998). Weber’s widely read work influenced Protestant America that a true Calvinist Protestant’s aim was not one of riches as divine favor, but of a different kind of businessman: one who aimed to live and work in a certain way; a way that mattered, and riches were merely a by-product of intrinsic value in work. As Maslow identifies the extent attached to the importance of money, Weber’s theories define the other given reason for becoming a healthcare professional: a true calling to take care of others and satisfaction with the intrinsic value of that task.

Weber went on to write “Bureaucracy”, an expose of the motivational components of the government administrative human relations system. The compensation system used by the federal government is considered by many to be one of the most desirable compensation packages for American workers available. Many of these ideas are now found in current human relations and motivational literature (Stillman 1998).

“Modern Officialdom”, as Weber named it, consists of enumerated items that describe the employees place in the organizational mission. Weber lists the characteristics of administrative management, and notes that government administration is not so different than private organization administration. Some of the concepts Weber espouses are noted with their relationship to healthcare management.

1. The principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas generally ordered by rules or laws: federal and state wide statutes on the practice of medicine, and separate required licenses for each state (jurisdiction).
2. The principles of office hierarchy and levels of graded authority: State Licensing and education delineating physicians from nurses, nurses from social workers, social workers from lab technicians…and so on.
3. Office management, official activity, and the following of general office rules or laws; (medical drugs and devices usage laws, certification, state Health department requirements, and accreditation).
4. The employ is a ‘vocation’, and is set for a career; (generally true for professionals that have invested a good deal of education into their healthcare career choice).
5. The ethical duty to avoid abusing the power of that vocation; (the Hippocratic Oath, the American Medical Association ethical guidelines)
6. Regular pecuniary compensation according to status rather than amount of work done. (Physician compensation is greater than in nursing, which is greater than in admissions or clerical work)
Finally, Weber did not exclude the economic aspect, identifying a moneyed economy as essential to the leveling and democratizing effects that are the reward of his complex ideology of administrative organizational management, and are as applicable to private corporations as to government.

What type of system is fair?

Since artificial forces control healthcare economics, compensation plans must be devised based on the organization’s culture, missions and goals. We have established that pay for performance is only effective to the point that the employee has reached the necessary material goals relevant to that employee’s culture and values. After that, intrinsic goals are better at motivating workers than the possibility of a merit raise at the employee’s annual review.
Still, that is not much help to corporate leaders, who must provide an attractive, fair and motivating compensation package for their employees, including the professionals. The US Federal government human resource systems modeled after Weber’s theories on bureaucracy are considered some of the best compensation plans, and comments to friends and family who secure a federal job seems to always includes the phrase “great benefits and security!”
The successful consonance of compensation for motivation in the private sector is so rare, that when a company does achieve a successful mix of pay and benefits, the story makes journal news. Meyners and Co., an 80-person, seven-partner, 45-CPA firm in Albuquerque New Mexico has successfully implemented a pay-for-performance system based on 360-degree feedback and win-win agreements. Using bonus pay for performance rather than a merit raise, Meyners and Co. also consults other firms in human resource issues.
A core competencies evaluation is essential to the plan. Core Competencies are defined as “specific skills and duties employees must be able to perform well to meet the firm’s profitability goals” (Brotherton 2003). The H-R executives at Meyners and Co. evaluate the core competencies as including 1) workplace behavior (core values) 2) business skills (core competencies); and 3) performance measures (meeting goals/win-win). . A 360-degree feedback performance analysis required the comprehensive creation of specific positional core competencies. (Refer to Rojas, K. “A Human Resource Management Plan”, for an example of a 360-degree feedback performance analysis for the RN Clinical Director position in the opiate-agonist addiction treatment field). While all three were included in the 360-degree-feedback, goal accomplishment assessment was the final analysis of a management by objectives plan, in which employees and supervisors established specific performance or educational goals and agreements that contributed to the organization’s mission (Brotherton 2003).

Perhaps the most innovative structure of this plan is in the method of payment for working hard to reach those goals: Rather than adding a percentage to salaries based on a pre-determined merit schedule, pay for good to excellent performance analysis is made through bonuses. Employees received annual salary raises by means of Annual Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs).
Individualized evaluations are central to the pay for performance plan by Meyners and Co. This element is incongruent with pay for performance purist detractors’ positions, who claim that teams have become such an integral part of organizational structure that individual assessment is futile. Such across-the-board categorizing of industries—service, manufacturing, retail—is short-sighted one-way thinking that has no place in the creativity required to manage and motivate employees, whether the organization employs five or five thousand people.

Conclusion

Pay for performance is just one of the many issues facing healthcare today, but because of the chain relationship illustrated above, is the lynch-pin of the private autonomous healthcare care system that the United States is known for, be that good or bad. Although organizations and think tanks are busy creating rhetoric and analyzing the issue, only a handful of organizations have reached the balance that has proved effective in the Meyers and Co. example. We can infer from a comparative analysis between Max Weber’s governmental agency management theories and general tenets of capitalism that business management is universal regardless of the organization’s bottom-line. Accepting that governmental management of healthcare in the form of socialized medicine may indeed provide healthcare for all and a government compensation system that has proved itself to be effective; but must also ask if the consequences of socialized medicine are not too great a cost for the already frail democratic attempt. The recent healthcare crisis across the country has had serious deleterious effects on the rates of pay and methods of compensation for professionals, paraprofessionals, administrators, and support personnel in charitable hospitals, motivating entire medical units to close their doors to the infirm across the nation (Vaknin 2002). Imperative and life-saving services have been eliminated as government funds are relinquished for other political efforts, particularly the military-industrial complex.


Works Cited

Halsall, Paul (1998). Frederick W. Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911. Modern History Sourcebook. Accessed on 10/31/03 at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1911taylor.html
Hunt, William G. (2003). Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. Education Psychology Interactive. Accessed on 10/31/03 at http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/regsys/maslow.html
Landes, David S. (1998). The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: W.W. Norton. Pp 650.
Lundberg, George D. M.D. (2003) Severed Trust: Why American medicine hasn’t been fixed. New York: Basic Books.
Vaknin, Sam. (2002) The Sickly State of Public Hospitals. Accessed on 10/30/02 at http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/text5-30-2002-19436.asp.
Weber, Max. (1947). Bureaucracy from Essays in Sociology. Translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills in 1946, Oxford University Press. Accessed in Public Administration: Concepts and Cases 6th Edition written and edited by Richard J. Stillman, 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pp 54-59
Health Data Management, Apr 2009. CPOEs; Editorial; Professional Journal.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Houston IS my BFF

A Home Health Nurse, who had moved to the Woodlands about a year ago, came to my house last week.  It was the initial informational visit prior to receiving Home Health Services, and so most of the time was spent answering Past History and Review of Systems questions.  She was sweet and kind, soft and well mannered, with a sweet voice still not influenced by “Southern Drawl”, and long blond hair that curled lightly about the cream sweater she was wearing, which distracted me during the visit, wanting to feel the fabric for weight and it seeming totally inappropriate in 93* weather.  Still, she seemed comfortable, and even the a/c dropped the temp to below my own comfort level, I let it run and rubbed my bare and neuropathic left foot as my toes turned blue. 

 

The only trouble I had answering the questions was the tight rope that was around my neck, squeezing with so much force that even getting breath in and out was a challenge, let alone forming words and sentences. 

Her pen checked boxes and scribbled quick notes as she worked to get through each item quickly. 

“Have you ever had asthma; rash; broken bone;…(name any illness, symptom or trauma).””

Yes, No, Yes, Yes, No, No, Yes, and I don’t know.

“Can you bathe, dress, brush your teeth?

Yes Yes Yes

The questions went on, and I answered them all until she asked me, having the information of my next of kin in two other separate states, “Why did you move to Houston?”

I stammered. The answer was right there, but if she had to ask, how could I explain to her?  Why would I choose to move to a city, where I knew no one, and would be hours away from my son in Louisiana, and a thousand miles from my daughter in Phoenix.  I began thinking of all the many happenings and choices, disasters and triumphs which had brought me to this point, this place, but could not repeat them, where would I even start?  The question, though, is more appropriately, why do I STAY in Houston? The crime, the traffic, the politics!

Yes, crime is an issue; traffic sucks; the politics are…politics. 

But the people are awesome.  I don’t necessarily have lots of best friends, and my life keeps me homebound much of the time. But I’m never alone, even when I’m by myself.  The people I know in this town are pricelessly loving.  They are creative, active, thinking, and giving.  They are healers, writers, poets, musicians, scientists.  They are performers, entertainers, teachers, and learners.  They model their beliefs, and they are Houston.  My BFFs. 

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Am I Good Enough? NaNoWriMo supporters say...


Facebook weaves in and out of my life, depending on my mood and schedule.  I sometimes go weeks without opening the program on my computer, posting small comments, updates or pictures by telephone.  I may use Facebook to see if there is anything going on in town, especially on the weekends.  My initial reason for opening a Facebook account was to promote my blog writings; I find, though, that previewing my feed almost always uncovers a thread that I feel I must comment on, and often those comments trigger a larger thesis.  This was the case when I read this post from the Nanowrimo blog during the April 2014 Camp Nano:
What if one becomes fairly certain that he or she just is not a good writer half way through NaNoWriMo... should he or she finish anyway?
Naturally, this frustrated Camper writing to a group of passionately committed wordsmiths, received much supportive advice:  Keep going; Don’t stop before you get to the hard stuff; and my favorite, do it because you love it!  For myself, this wavering esteem is all too familiar, and so I write this to both the original status poster and to that part of myself that is forever procrastinating and denying my true nature.  I suffer from the malady of moderation.    Then I would suggest that he or she should not concern themselves on the specific technique or outcome of their writing but rather on the passion with which it was written.  I would suggest that one’s proclivity towards putting words on a page is more important than the order that the words were placed.   Although my writing was encouraged and praised in college and Graduate School, and I have been writing consistently before, during and since then, the success I seek for my writings has not yet come to pass.  Still, I continue to write.  Some of my prose might end up on a blog and perhaps even read by a small group of curious Twitter followers or Facebook ‘'friends”.  Do I ever think that I am wasting my time, and life would be so much easier if I didn’t put this much pressure on myself or open my self so vulnerably to criticism from those who may read it? Every day.  Can I stop writing?  Never.  It is what I do.  I may not yet be noticed, I may not yet know the formula for a fiction novel, and my non-fiction may digress occasionally; but I keep writing.  When you have completed your Nanowrimo Word Count Goal, note how you feel.  Proud? Accomplished?  Ready for the next step?  Do you feel like there are things you need to finish or change?  Plot holes so big you can drive a truck through them?  Not only is writing a passion, and an art, writers are both teachers and learners.  The community of support that one finds with Nanowrimo will spill into your life.  I had no idea how big the writing network was until I started Nanowrimo in 2010.  From there, I found support and opportunities right in my own backyard, and my writing circle began to expand from my virtual world into my reality.  It has colored and infused it with creativity, support, and when you need or ask for it, critique.     
Don’t ever stop doing what you love.  “Good” is subjective. 





Monday, March 24, 2014

GrAS Helps Three Good and Sustainable People!

The main purpose and design of the Green Association for Sustainability is one of education:  Specifically, to DEFINE and ANALYZE social paradigms as well as civil laws, and PROMOTE those that may lead to a good and sustainable society. 

When first deliberating on how best to learn and teach about these widely varying topics, social media seemed the best way to disseminate information over a large population, as the need to be able to sustain one’ s self and family is a very large issue.  Since 2009, I have been publishing information in the blog at www.sustainablygreen.blogspot.com.  In publishing information, I can reach a large number of people; yet all around me are people who need specific help in getting that job, taking that class, passing that test, organizing their time, accomplishing their goals, or researching a relevant issue.

 

I am very proud to announce for the first quarter of 2014, that the Good Society Division (GS) of the Green Association for Sustainability has assisted three people on a one-on-one level:

1. Independent 24 year old Fred was given assistance in creating a resume for a specific job position, and also received job interview counseling over two sessions. 

2. University business major, Chris, received three tutoring sessions in Business Statistics, and is continuing with the tutoring through the semester.

3.  Already securing a serving position in a local club, Shad received technical assistance in completing the exam for TABC (Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission) Certification.

My best wishes for their continued success, and I thank all who support The Green Association for Sustainability, making it possible to assist those who are trying to better their own lives by improving the society we all  live in. 

 

For more information about the Green Association for Sustainability, visit www.sustainablygreen.blogspot.com, or on Facebook, www.facebook.com/sustainablygreen, or write me personally through either site. 

 

Kimmarie Rojas

Administrator, GrAS