We know it's a little different, but hopefully it's something that's impactful for you.

I'm Dakota Jones.

I'm here in Salt Lake City, and I'm getting ready to start my Where the Water Was project.

This is a 260 mile run around the Great Salt Lake.

The Great Salt Lake has been drying up for years, and it's a tremendous health and environmental hazard for millions of people and animals living in this area.

And there are a ton of solutions that we can take action on right away, but the state legislature and all the citizens of Utah are not taking action fast enough.

So what this project aims to do is raise awareness for the problem, as well as all these solutions that are really effective, something we can implement right away and which will allow us to maintain our livelihoods and our cultural identity here in Northern Utah.

But your votes needed more than ever.

Do you wanna give just a kind of high-level overview of what we're doing and what you're planning to do with Footprints?

Yeah.

So the, the project's called Where the Water Was.

It's a run all the way around the Great Salt Lake.

The Great Salt Lake is one of the biggest, um, saline lakes in the world, um, and it's certainly the largest one in the United States, and it just mean-- A saline lake is just a salty lake.

So, like, we're here in the Great Basin in Salt Lake, um, in Salt Lake City, so none of the rivers that flow through this area, which is most of Nevada and western Utah, none of them flow to the ocean.

And so all the rivers flow into these depressions.

We're gonna talk about the issues with the lake." But we talked about very intentionally partnering and kind of discovering these local organizations and nonprofits who are doing exactly that, putting together talking points, helping people learn more, putting on events, um, again, doing the work every day, and just kind of how we settled on the partners that we are focusing on and kinda how to support them.

Yep.

And, um, I mean, I, and not just her, but lots of other friends.

And so we developed this idea that there's, like, mentors, like the staff at the camp are experts in not just climate action, but also, like, business and, and government work and nonprofits, and how to basically bring a community cl- a community action project to life.

And then we invite people to apply by sharing ...

Honestly, they don't have to have a project.

They don't have to really know what to do, but they have to be like, "This is something I'm really concerned about, and this is why it matters." We really care about, like, having this passion and connection to your community.

That's what matters.

Mm-hmm

Um, how did you find this transition moving on to the East Coast or as the Golden Trail says it, the Beast Coast?

The Beast Coast.

Nice.

They didn't invent that.

Um, it's amazing out here.

You know, I, I've been out here to visit before, but I've never had so much time to explore.

Um, and it's, it's been really cool.

Uh, we've seen you with the I Love Quebec T-shirt.

Was there anything like by going through the camp as a camper that like clarified something that you needed to know as the leader of the organization?

you know i don't know if it was something some big like takeaway like that it was a really good experience um really though like what made like we changed a whole lot last year for last year's camp we expanded our board of directors uh significantly from like three to seven people um and we really rewrote our strategic strategic uh plan and our mission vision values and um the person who really kind of designed the camp experience was a guy named john john war who's really really cool guy really smart guy lives in mexico city he's from detroit um and he's done a lot of events like this and so he's the one who really created the camp experience and i was in a lot of ways supporting him as he did that um and then we had the mentors like addy create like there are elements of it.

And so it really came together, but the true architect was John John.

Um, and so like then going through that experience was, was pretty cool because I knew what to expect in some ways, but then the experience was different.

It always is different because the experience is like implementing with real people.

Um, there were a few things that were jarring.

Like at one point we did a little kind of discussion.

I don't know, a story about an alumni or something that's particularly powerful for you? Like as you look back at the four or five years of Footprints, is there something where you look at and you're like, wow, like this is actually having an impact?