STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY MARTY SCHNURE/Wild Gift

Sashti Balasundaram says his invention might have helped prevent the compost fire that burned for weeks in Ohio Gulch.

Diamonique Clark’s mission, meanwhile, is to convince inner city black youth that the places like Yellowstone National Park are not likely to be as dangerous as their neighborhood streets.

Balasundaram and Clark are two of the five Wild Gift Fellows who just completed a 20-day trek into the White Cloud and Boulder Wilderness areas to fine tune their ideas for making the world a better place.

They shared some of what they had learned in a meet-and-greet at the Ketchum Innovation Center as they gave the blisters on their feet a rest.

And they lauded the Wild Gift program, which was started by former Ketchum outfitter Bob Jonas as a 12-month program to mentor entrepreneurs bent on creating a better world.

“His idea was: What if you could get young entrepreneurs before they were influenced by the rest of the world?” said Chris Howell, a 2010 Fellow who created an eco-culinary tour promoting more than 30 farms in Vermont. “The trek is their wild gift, giving them the opportunity to learn ways of brainstorming and problem solving.”

Clark noted how the group stood often at the bottom of mountains looking up and thinking, ‘How impossible!’

“Then we found ourselves on top looking down in amazement,” she added.

The trip, which took the Fellows up the narrow path to Silver Lake then up and over a razor-thin ridgeline opening up onto the Boulder Mountains Wilderness, was Clark’s first backpack trip.

She hopes to turn other young people of color onto camping and other outdoor experiences.

“Back home in Baltimore there isn’t a lot of opportunity for young people to participate in the outdoors,” she said. “People of color make up only 10 percent of the visitors to the national parks. My idea is to get young people of color excited about the outdoors and teach them how to tell stories about their experiences in the outdoors through texts, short films and photos to get others excited about it.”

Many youth of color are fearful of going outside of their homes, let alone going into the outdoors and sleeping in a bag, Clark said.

“When we do hear about camping or hiking outdoors, it’s usually a story about someone being killed by a grizzly or mountain lion, so why would we want to do that? Plus, it’s expensive. Many of these youth could never afford a Patagonia jacket.”

Clark is determined to turn that around, however, with her B’Broad, an environmental education program teaching kids about the environment, providing them digital storytelling skills and offering them travel experiences to gain a perspective of the natural world.

“Currently, people of color represent less than 16 percent of the environment workforce, yet we’re projected to be the majority demographic in the United States by 2040,” she said. “The certainty of a livable environment is at stake if there are no strategic efforts to engage people of color in environmental advocacy and stewardship. I believe that once you respect the environment, you want to protect it.”

Balasundaram discovered the magic of turning food scraps into natural fertilizer for gardens, parks and cities as an Indicorps Fellow in India. Moving to Brooklyn, he was flabbergasted to learn that New York City was spending $400 million each year to take 113 tons of food waste daily to landfill and incinerators since its compost facility closed in 2014.

Balasundaram created a waste management paradigm called WeRadiate that he said will provide jobs and research while allow businesses and municipalities to save money by turning organic scraps into compost to fertilize gardens and parks instead of transporting them to landfills or incinerators.

Then he developed a compost sensor that will monitor the temperature and moisture of compost to provide high quality compost. The sensor, which will alert managers if the temperature is getting too hot, might have prevented the fire at Ohio Gulch, he said.

“Good soil makes our city sustainable,” he said. “And this sensor takes the mystery out of the process for everyone from the home grower to the commercial composter.

This year’s other fellows include Justin Falcone, who is building a platform using visualization and storytelling to tell the story of communities that could be wiped off the map by climate change.

Laurel Fieselman chairs Transplanting Traditions Community Farm, a community supported agriculture venture in Chapel Hill, N.C., in which refugees grow vegetables sold to the CSA members as they learn to run a farm business in the United States.

And Aneri Pradhan is the founder and executive director of ENVenture, an incubator that finances and trains rural cooperatives to start clean energy enterprises in Uganda where rural women lack access to modern forms of energy for lighting and cooking.

Pradhan has also founded a mobile bookkeeping application for micro-entrepreneurs and has prototyped new social impact technologies for Facebook’s Sustainability and Connectivity Lab.

Aimee Christensen, who founded the Sun Valley Institute and the Sun Valley Forum, met Pradhan while she was an energy access officer at the United Nations Foundation.

“She’s doing amazing work,” Christensen said.