Newsletter #58 - April 14, 2012 - www.thelovealliance.net

Our "Give Shoes. Give Love" campaign is going fantastically. If you haven’t heard, we launched this campaign in partnership with Soles4Souls where for only $7/month you can provide 7 pairs of shoes to children in need. We are grateful for all of you who are signing up and spreading the word including Jessica Simpson who gave the campaign a shout out on her social networks this past month. Through everyone’s combined efforts we have had many more people sign up to give shoes monthly allowing us to provide over 3,300 pairs of shoes to children in need. That number is growing everyday through your help. Click here if you would like to sign up to give shoes, to spread the word, or to learn more about the campaign.

As spring time rolls in so does our festival season. Our goal this summer is to give away as many shoes as possible through new sign ups to the "Give Shoes. Give Love" campaign. Next weekend (April 21st) we will be heading to our first music festival of the year, Purple Door. This festival normally falls in the summer but has moved to the spring this year. We have attended Purple Door in Pennsylvania for the past five years and are excited that this date change will allow us to connect to a whole new crowd of people including students from the many area universities that are usually out of session during the festival. If you are going to be at the festival, make sure to stop by the booth. For more information and to buy tickets visit www.purpledoor.com

We officially confirmed this summer's tour manager, Chris Plunkett, this past week. He graciously volunteered to tour with us all last summer. He called us excited to do it again and we couldn’t have been more thrilled. We are also thrilled to welcome our good friend Owen to the tour team this summer. We met Owen years ago at a festival when he was 14. Since then he has become a group leader and an active participant in educating his community on injustice and their ability to impact it. He has volunteered at the booth for many summer festivals. Now that he’s 18 he will be hitting the road as a full fledge member of our tour team. We are so honored to have a tour team that is so eager to educate and activate people to make a difference towards injustice.

Next weekend, on April 20th, Invisible Children is having their Cover The Night event for their Kony 2012 campaign. Since 1987, Joseph Kony has abducted more than 30,000 children in Central Africa and forced them to be child soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army. Their goal is to join in the efforts to bring Kony to justice by bringing mass world attention to the matter. On April 20th supporters can join with Invisible Children in this effort by posting Kony 2012 posters. Be sure to ask the permission of shop owners, in their words “keep it legal, and go huge.” Learn more about Kony 2012 and Cover the night here: www.invisiblechildren.com and www.kony2012.com

Our Focus this next month continues to be on the Environment. Enter the discount code: Environment at our webstore during April to receive 10% off your order. We will also be offering ‘Remember the Environment’ flyer cards (50 Pack) for $1. Click here to order your discounted merchandise.

ACTION PROJECT

We continue to focus on the Environment in April with our 5th Annual Community Cleanup. This month we encourage all of our groups and supporters to join a community cleanup or plan their own. Many cities put together their own community cleanups for Earth Day (4/22) and Arbor Day (4/27). Check out www.earthday.org and www.kab.org to see if anything is going on in your community.

No matter where you look, we guarantee you will be able to find trash that needs picking up. For an interesting story about what happens to a great deal of trash that does not get picked up listen to the prologue of this archive episode of This American Life called “The Middle of Nowhere”: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/253/the-middle-of-nowhere

It is also easy to plan your own community clean up. Choose a day and time and then invite your friends, family and co-workers. You can provide or ask people to bring garden or latex gloves and trash bags or reuse grocery bags to collect your trash. Past community cleanups have been done at the beach, parks, neighborhood streets, highways, etc. Of course we urge you to be extremely careful if you decide to do a road clean up.

Don't forget to recycle all of the garbage that you can. Let's be a part of making our communities and the world we live in a safer, cleaner and more beautiful place for ourselves and the generations after us that will be inheriting our mess. Be a part of not only changing the environment in a positive way, but of also changing the perceptions of the people around you.