SOME NOTES ON A YEAR IN THE TRENCHES BUILDING THE SLIDE RANCH WEB SITE

Slide Ranch has launched its new Web site!! http://www.slideranch.org/index.html A year in the making...I'm so happy to see it go live at long last!!

A year ago I agreed to lead the build of a new Web site for the Taproot Foundation. The Taproot Foundation offers grants to local non-profits. They grant local non-profits one of three tyoes of grants: 1) a new web site 2) a donor database 3) a branding project.

Taproot awarded Slide Ranch an "Advanced Website" grant. As the Program Director I was tasked with assembling the team from the Pro Bono technologists in the Taproot Volunteer Database. The team I assembled turned out to be one of the most outstanding groups of volunteers I have ever worked with. This group of volunteers, each of them massively successsful in their own line of work and in their own careers, were willing to meet on a weekly basis to design and build, for free, a Web site of the highest quality.

But what a great organization to donate our time to! Slide Ranch: "Where the Bay Area Gets Down to Earth" has been a beacon of healthy foods, healthy living, and childhood outdoor education in the Bay Area for decades. What a location: located on a thin strip of land between Highway 1 and the Pacific ocean--half way between Muir Beach and Stinson Beach--a place with a BILLION dollar view and two dollar camp houses.

This tiny little place that spends its hours re-connecting children to their earth, to their food, and to the land through its organic sustainable agriculture represents to me so much that is right in the world. The healthy foods movement--cant popularized by Michael Pollan in The Onnivore's Dilemma--plays out in the minds and hearts of children at play in the wild at Slide Ranch.

Please visit Slide. Visit their Web site. Make a donation. Eat a locally grown green bean!

If anyone wants to hold a poetry reading out at Slide Ranch count me in! I'd love to set up a reading by a couple of well established writers in the Slide Ranch yurt. Yep, a yurt!