IMPACT
Cultivating Our Vision One Community at a Time
Postcards Cultivating Change
At You Matter Visionography, our signature line is "Live, Record, Repeat". Through our postcards and vision, we encourage everyone to see the beauty of their surroundings, and we hope to inspire adventures and connection with the land, and support of their local community.
1. We are seeking growers, processors, and manufacturers to help realize the most eco-friendly next generation of postcards.
2. We donate a total of 20% of our profits toward:
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10% donated to a local land conservation organization serving the area where the postcards set is inspired.
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Hawai'i Island Landscape Postcard Series set
Donation to: Hawaiian Islands Land Trust: Hawai'i Island
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10% is donated to our fund for vision development — a supply network and product(s) that benefits the land and communities linked to them.
Aloha 'āina,, Mālama Pono
We, Amicheli (who's family is from Venezuela) and Taylor, were raised in Kentucky and grew up with a love of nature, and the outdoors — a love that has been passed down to our daughter, Fiona. When we moved to Hawai'i, we discovered this phrase that summed up how we have always felt about the land we live and adventure on; Aloha 'Āina, Mālama Pono. Each of these words could fill a book with their nuances of meaning and beauty. In short, it means: love and honor the land that nourishes you, be a righteous steward in your care for it. This is at the core of our vision and we will always carry this land ethic within us.
Our Growing Vision
In our search for an Earth-friendly postcard, our mission quickly expanded into a desire for helping communities thrive in rekindling their connection with the land, in turn, yielding economic empowerment. In our research, we believe that hemp is the way to reach that mission, with our focus on assisting those who want to farm hemp, which is at the heart of the production network. For us, the path of positive impact with any product and practice, means to have the entire production from seed to finished goods, be local and sustainable — teaming with existing and/or attracting new local processors and manufacturers within 200 miles from where the hemp is grown.
Why Hemp?
Hemp is a newly re-emerging industry that can be used to create over 25,000 different products using the fibers, grains, flowers, or seeds. It contains approximately 40% more cellulose than trees. Hemp can yield 4x the fiber per acre of what an average forest can, and it matures in as little as 100 days, while trees mature in 20-100 years. Hemp paper lasts longer, and can be recycled 5x more than paper made from trees. Hemp pulp does not require as many chemicals as wood-pulp, which could dramatically decrease the number of toxins and chemicals polluting soil and water. In addition to this, hemp can improve the soil quality of the land it is grown on. Pulling carbon dioxide from the air and sinking it into the soil, and even pulling heavy metals and other toxins from the soil and neutralizing or binding them. The byproducts can be used as a part of compost to give back to the land, or for energy production.
Our long-term goal is to use these qualities of hemp to help communities, such as in Eastern Kentucky, that are struggling from the decline of the coal industry — socially, economically, and environmentally. There are independent teams, in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, conducting exciting research on the effect of growing hemp on devastated coal mining land to regenerate degraded soils. In addition, hemp is a high-value crop that doesn’t need extensive space to grow, making it ideal to help rural communities with limited economic resources, throughout the country.
What’s Next?
Currently based in Colorado, we are growing our resources and learning, as we move toward our long-term goal and vision. We deem it important to start on the path of creating a local network to supply a printer with the needed resources to create a greener paper product for us in an ecologically sound manner, and with as small of a footprint as possible. Using what we learn in Colorado, our next step is to create a model to help one town at a time build a livelihood to support the individual, the community, and the 'āina.
