I am a teacher, social worker and athlete with a penchant for adventure,
alternative sports, and people-to-people activism. I've traveled
extensively, working and living in Guatemala and Nicaragua in the late '80's. 
I teach classes on relationships, violence prevention and sexual health for incarcerated men and others. I've
spent about twenty years working with at-risk and special needs youth in
residential programs, private schools, wilderness programs as well as
within public school classrooms. I also love footbag.
I discovered footbag in 1985 in an attempt to bond with a gang of beloved but recalcitrant alternative school truants. One morning I "caught" a group of my students hiding out in the woods smoking and engrossed in kicking a small ball around. One thing led to another and those kids and I began playing daily and making bags with salvaged upholstery leather and cotton thread. Footbag was a fortuitous addition in my life. Having incurred a severe chondromalacia knee injury (as a bike-touring fanatic four years previous), footbag offered me a convenient, fun, aerobic workout with little of the repetitive pounding and grinding so damaging to knee joints. For this sidelined athlete, footbag came as a joyous reprieve.
I was also fascinated by footbag's uncanny capacity as a group builder. Playing the game with my students, I observed a powerful catalyst of community and a keenly intrinsic motivator. Keeping the bag aloft within the circle and rallying together in quest of the proverbial "jam" or "hack", friends, strangers, colleagues - even enemies... could not help being drawn together, animated by cooperation and teamwork.
Based on these and other portentous footpeace experiences, in 1988-89 I organized and led a six person, athletic friendship expedition
through rural Central America. Over the next four years I co-edited and produced (with independent
film director Robbie Leppzer) a 30 minute video documentary chronicling this unusual trip:
"Futbolito: A Journey Through Central America". The tape was nationally
broadcast on PBS ("The 90's") in 1993, 
featured at the Vermont International Film Festival in 1994 and shown on The Learning Channel (excerpted) in 1996.
I've been an avid footbagger for thirteen years as well as a serious competitor, off and on, for ten. Several years ago I began combining my work in health and sex education with my love of footbag through the Footbag Mentors Project, a peer leadership program which uses the game to 'hook' and motivate hard-to-reach teenagers. With a grant from Kaiser Permanente during 1996-97, I put together Challenging Peer Violence, a three part, school-based, health workshop on teen sexuality and relationships which, of course, also includes a series of after-school footbag sessions, sewing clinics and discussion groups.
I have enjoyed designing and making my own custom footbags as well as teaching footbag making for a dozen years. I offer footbag sewing clinics (on the web and in the flesh) as well as footbag instruction and workout classes by arrangement.
I am also available on a consulting basis as a trainer, speaker and/or program designer for schools, agencies and companies. I offer a unique and eclectic mix of curriculum design, group facilitation and teaching skills, with specialty areas in teen health, sexuality, domestic abuse, men's counseling issues and violence prevention education. Please inquire.