I have a vision of students and teachers in Cecil County, Maryland getting interactive, hands-on, environmental and engineering lessons about making sustainable choices for the environment and their local community. These are the choices that change the world! I can see the vision materialize by building an Eco Machine, and make powerful education lessons about character, ethics, and self-discovery with it.

One female cat and her offspring can produce 420,000 cats in seven years. More than 11 million dogs and cats are euthanized in shelters each year. Millions more are abandoned in rural and urban areas. 61% of all dogs and 75% of all cats entering shelters are destroyed. I have a passionate love for animals. How could I not help? When I saw some of the conditions they had to live in shelters, I was heart broken. I saw animals starving, dying and suffering. How they could let it get that bad is beyond me. Not to mention, the euthanization level was out of control.

The San Pedro Coffee Farm is located in the community of Tambo, about half an hour from Penonomé, in the province of Coclé in Panama. The San Pedro Farm is collectively run by 7 families. The farm produces about 550 gallons/year of unprocessed beans, buys about 500 additional gallons from nearby farms and sells to several of Panama’s national coffee roasters. Coffee production is labor and resource intensive, and although the farm has a secure market, the price of unprocessed beans is a poor return to labor, and farmers’ incomes remain low.

Tragically, Santiago Atitlan, a 95-percent-indigenous town with around 40,000 inhabitants, illustrates well the injustice that confronts many rural indigenous Guatemalans. It is located in a region that was particularly hard-hit by the thirty-six-year internal armed conflict that plagued Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. The war, which was especially intense in the 1980s, and a history of systematic social marginalization have left most women in Santiago with few marketable skills. Only five of the over 200 women I have worked with over the years are literate or semi-literate.

Currently at the end of every semester, the Tucson, Arizona community is filled with stray cats and dogs. Many believe this is because students get pets, but realize they can't take care of them due to other obligations. We want to educate the student body and community that having a pet is a life long commitment and there are certain responsibilites that one has when adopting a pet. In addition, we want to help the pet population ,from soaring to the point where the community can't take care of all these animals, by spaying and neutering them.

For something that takes so many lives, driving, it is not hard to be allowed to receive your license. Because it is so easy, students don't take driving seriously. As a high school student I constantly hear stories of crashes, wrecks, and accidents. These stories are usually accommodated with laughs, giggles, and jokes. Students have died at our high school due to crashes and other vehicle related accidents, but outlooks don't seem to change. I don't believe that the state, or the country is following driving laws according to the changes of the current day.

My name is Luke and I am on the Teen Advisory Board for the Greenfield Public Library, in Greenfield, Wisconsin. I also play the piano and understand how listening to music can inspire a person to be passionate about playing an instrument. The problem is that the library has nothing for kids to listen to (unless you like Wayne Newton and Yanni) and the library is not able to buy many more new music CDs to inspire kids like me who love to listen to music but can’t afford to buy it.

Drive Safe uses a variety of magnetic, pressure sensitive, and static cling safety signs with simple messages to improve road and highway safety for all motorist, especially a beginning teenage driver, or senior citizen with slowed or limited motor skills. Our motto: "Deterring road rage, and highway fatalities one motorist at a time."