Dear Friends of A Living Library & Life Frames, Inc.,

It is always a great pleasure to send greetings and updates to you in this Holiday Season of Sharing & Giving.  We sincerely hope that you will consider supporting Life Frames, Inc. in your year-end donations for our work developing, place-based, Branch Living Library & Think Parks in multiple schools and communities with integrated hands-on learning programs.  A Living Library, or A.L.L., creates content-rich, ecological environments with integrated, multidisciplinary, standards-based curricula for all ages.  Your generous donations – large or small - will help us continue, and also expand our services by developing new Branch Living Library sites in communities – locally and globally.

As the Superintendent of Schools in San Francisco, Richard Carrenza, recently wrote: "For over sixteen years, Life Frames has dedicated thousands of hours and worked with many more thousands of our students and school communities. These collaborations have helped transform their schools’ campuses and neighborhoods into unique, place-based, ecological learning landscapes, each called A Living Library & Think Park.  Through exemplary hands-on, interdisciplinary, standards-based training, the students learn a diverse range of content, including math, science, history, language arts, multi-arts, and technology. Students also become well-versed in issues of climate change, conservation, water and watersheds, green infrastructure and energy, recycling, rainwater harvesting, green jobs, environmental justice, and other ecological practices."

Life Frames has had an especially busy, productive, auspicious year of growth and accomplishments at our existing Branch Living Library & Think Park sites in San Francisco and New York City,  working with over 2500 children and youth each month, year-round, in hands-on learning and greening of their school’s campus and neighborhood.  Additionally, we are developing the Bernal Heights Living Library Nature Walk  linking several schools, parks, public housing, streets, and other open spaces leading to the currently hidden Islais Creek, where, we have planted over 1000 California native trees and hundreds of native understory plants with hundreds of volunteer youth and adults.  This Nature Walk is a prototype for what can be developed throughout the Islais Creek Watershed, the largest in San Francisco, that interconnects eleven communities.

We are also in discussion with other communities interested in developing their unique, Branch Living Library & Think Park -  from McMinnville, Oregon, to San Antonio, Texas,  to Bronx, New York, to Mexico City, Mexico, and Eindhoven, The Netherlands.  One of Life Frame’s Goals is to interlink A.L.L. Branches through green-powered technologies, so we can learn about similarities and diversities of cultures and ecologies – near and far – and share experience.