Colorado Rocky Mountain School seniors Cairo bound with Operation Smile

Colorado Rocky Mountain School seniors, Mima Strong and Olivia Mertz, started an Operation Smile Club on the CRMS campus in the fall of 2008. Operation Smile is a global organization that provides free surgeries to cleft -palate children around the world. Since its inception in 1982, Operation Smile has given over 135,000 children a new chance at life by providing them with safe, effective reconstructive surgery to correct their facial deformities. Utilizing all-school meetings as a platform to raise awareness surrounding this organization and bake sales as their key fundraising mechanism, their club enjoys 11 student members, has raised over $2,200, and has funded eight cleft -palate surgeries.

In August of 2009, Mima and Olivia attended an Operation Smile International Leadership conference in Norfolk, Virginia with 500 other students from around the world. This was the pair’s first step towards making an Operation Smile medical mission a reality. Then this past January they traveled to Norfolk one more time for a Mission Training Workshop with 25 other students. At this workshop, they learned what it means to go on an Operation Smile medical mission and that the primary role of a student is to educate the local community. Students on missions will meet hundreds of families and children every day at the hospital or in the local schools and orphanages. And that the students will have opportunities to give presentations on Dental Hygiene, Oral Re-hydration, Burn Care, and Nutrition. Students also spend time with children and families before their surgeries and after, and are even able to sit in on the medical surgeries.

Mima and Olivia just received the exciting news that they have been placed together on an Operation Smile Medical Mission in Cairo, Egypt in late March. They will be traveling with a student sponsor as well as a medical team for their ten-day journey. For more information please go to www.crms.org/about/student-advocacy

Simon Isaacs, Colorado Rocky Mountain School class of 1999

VICE PRESIDENT, CAUSE-MARKETING AND SUSTAINABILITY, ignition Inc

Simon Isaacs is a leading thinker in sustainability and cause-related marketing. Simon is a Vice President at ignition Inc where he leads the cause-marketing division, working with corporate and nonprofit brands develop and launch global awareness, fundraising and marketing campaigns around issues such as clean water, malaria, HIV/AIDS and education. Simon’s clients include the Coca-Cola Company, Gucci, Chick-Fil-A, BP, the World Wildlife Fund, the Ubuntu Education Fun, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Foundation among others. Simon also helps lead cause and sustainability work around the 2010 FIFA World Cup and Vancouver Olympics.

Simon previously lived in Rwanda where he worked for the William J. Clinton Foundation, directing safe drinking water and agriculture programs. Prior to Rwanda, Simon served as a Partnerships Officer at the United Nations Foundation where he raised and managed more than $30 million in corporate partnerships in support of the UN's disaster and development efforts. Simon is also responsible for helping to establish the Global Water Challenge.

Simon is an active climber and runner, placing 2nd in the San Francisco Marathon. In 2007, Simon ran on foot around the world as part of the Blue Planet Run to raise awareness and funds for the drinking water cause. In January, 2010, Simon is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with several celebrities and global influencers which is also part of a clean-water focused campaign. Simon is an expert blogger for Fast Company and is currently writing a book on cause-marketing.

To learn more about Colorado Rocky Mountain School go to www.crms.org

CRMS alumni on Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Book list

Delta County Independent - Written by Kathy Browning

Wednesday, 30 December 2009 00:00

“Dude, you should check out what’s happening right now on Twitter.” That was how Paonia author Paolo Bacigalupi learned TIME Magazine had ranked his book, “The Windup Girl” number nine for 2009. Paolo Bacigalupi “It was a thrill. It was pretty out of the blue,” Bacigalupi said. He knew that a new book reviewer for TIME, Lev Grossman, had liked the book. Grossman wrote about it on his blog at www.Techland.com. Bacigalupi received no official notice from TIME, but the news spread very fast. “It was up half an hour before I heard about it. It was fantastic news.” He has enjoyed a couple of years of gaining recognition building his reputation in literary circles. A collection of short stories, “Pump Six and Other Stories,” came out last year. It was named Best Book of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly. He has won some major science fiction awards for his short stories, among them was a nomination for the Hugo Award. “The Windup Girl” is his first published novel. “It was a complicated novel for me to write.” It took three years of steady work to finish the book. “I wasn’t really sure of the response it would get. I had the feeling when I finished it, that it was a little too much of a hybrid. In some ways it’s a classic style science fiction, but at the same time it is wandering through some pretty complicated questions in our society about environmentalism and the nature of humanity. Those issues get addressed in science fiction, but it doesn’t seem exactly the way I was doing it. I was concerned the novel was a little too literary for science fiction, and a little too science fiction for literary, and maybe a little too environmental for both,” he laughed. “I didn’t anticipate the response would be so positive. It’s going into its fourth printing.” His publisher is Night Shade Books in San Francisco. They had handled his short story collection and made a big push to get his novel. “They did a great job of promoting it, and getting it out to people. They’ve been real champions for the idea of this book, which I think in a lot of ways, wasn’t an easy fit with bigger publishing houses,” he said. “It’s a little bit of an unlikely success for a book like this coming out from a small science fiction specialty house and get this kind of recognition.” Raphel-Lacoste was the artist who did the artwork for the book cover. He does imagery for matte painting for movies and video games. “It’s a puzzle when a reader picks up a book. You always have expectations what you are going to see. With certain genres it’s really easy to fulfill those expectations,” he shared. “When you start taking different forms and start putting them together and crossing over with different genre elements, you end up in some very interesting places, but they don’t necessarily fair well with people’s psyche.” In “The Windup Girl,” Bacigalupi found it necessary to spend a good deal of time of world building to make this futuristic world seem real. In some ways the book is a political thriller while not automatically falling into that mold. The plot includes huge civil unrest resulting in explosive action. As an author, Bacigalupi was willing to take the chance on combining elements from different styles. “I thought it would be a failure because it was too strange, too different.” Obviously, he now knows he was absolutely wrong in misjudging the reception by readers. They got it, and they liked it. The book takes place in Bangkok, Thailand after global warming has occurred and sea levels have risen. Bangkok is a walled city with huge levees and dikes to protect it from the rising waters. At the same time, there have been worldwide agriculture plagues wiping out the food supply. Thailand has survived with their seed banks which other countries do not have. The calorie companies are trying to hunt down and find those banks with genetically diverse seed. Bacigalupi was born in Colorado Springs, moving to Paonia when he was just six months old. He grew up on Sunshine Mesa. He attended Hotchkiss Middle School, Hotchkiss High School and Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. It was at the last school where he learned how to write clean, tight prose. He thought he would be published by 25, but his first four novels all failed. He’s now 37 and his fifth novel sold. “Fifth time is the charm. I’ve been writing for about 14 years. It’s been a slow process.” For more information, visit his website www.windupstories.com.

Balancing Intellect with a Moral Scope

It is a common theme in independent school education that intellect must be balanced by a moral scope. I have always believed that Colorado Rocky Mountain School does an amazing job of preparing its students for college and later life by giving them a solid foundation in both areas. However, a recent dinner with an alumnus during my travels through Asia helped me to see it even better from a student's perspective.

This past fall during my trip to Tokyo, I had the pleasure of meeting Taro Tomisawa, a recent alumnus who currently works for a Japanese foundation. Taro was my guide that evening; not only through an unfamiliar cuisine but also in sharing what he felt was the unique educational gift that Colorado Rocky Mountain School had given him. As we savored our way through an assortment of dishes that required an explanation and an eating strategy, Taro surprised me with an impressive insight about CRMS. He told me that he has come to strongly believe that performing community service is one of the most important values that our school has to share with the world. He came to this conclusion after realizing that during his time here his sense of service became habitual and that since graduating from CRMS five years ago and attending Colorado College, he has found it challenging to find the opportunities to do more to improve the communities in which he has lived and worked.

As the Head of School, I have the unique opportunity of seeing first-hand the impact our program has on people. Alumni often tell me about the difference the CRMS experience has meant in their lives and the importance of the unique opportunities that were available to them. On occasion some alumni will reflect on the depth and breadth of our program and how they wish that they had been more involved and taken advantage of what was offered here. Others have lamented that, in retrospect, four years was simply not enough time. Most alumni ask that we never get rid of the household job and work crew programs, because they taught them skills that they would later need. Few, however, have framed it in the way that Taro did for me that evening in Tokyo. His assessment that CRMS is unique in that it inculcates the value of service through the entire program is something that we probably take for granted, because it is a part of our daily lives and culture.

In our most recent alumni newsletter, we highlight some wonderful programs that are a part of the school community as a result of the passion and interest of student leaders: Operation Smile, FaceAIDS, Soles 4 Souls, and Random Acts of Kindness. All of these student-initiated clubs do a wonderful job of getting us to think beyond ourselves. They hold true to the spirit of progressive education that seeks to create involved, knowledgeable, and skilled citizens.

Preparation for college begins with a strong academic foundation, but knowledge without an applied sense of value and purpose has a limited scope. This combination of knowledge and values is something that as educators we all believe in, but it is what Taro helped me to see in a different light that evening. My conversation with Taro has since had me thinking about this sense of service on a more day-to- day level, the very spirit of service from which these clubs and programs originate. For Taro it was simply a way of life, a habit, and a way of seeing the world. The value of service became so integral to Taro's life that he views it as the most important aspect of his CRMS experience.

Creating students who view service as a key part of their lives, so much so that they must seek it out to feel satisfied and complete, is ultimately what we are striving for. As we move into the second semester, it is important to remind ourselves that some of the mundane aspects of our lives (i.e. household jobs, work crews, cleaning the dormitories and rooms, and random acts of kindness) are really wonderful opportunities that if taken with an open mind will forge a life-long belief. This awareness was recently manifested in a student's noticing and acting upon a need that resulted in a group effort to provide a disabled neighbor with some new winter clothing. It is in the team spirit that was generated from hard-working soccer players and a school that supports them. It was in the way that the school finished the first semester strong with final exams, an exceptional art show, a band concert, and a climbing competition.

We look forward to continuing this legacy of education and service.

Jeff Leahy
Head of School