It was only fitting that such a magical run ended with the team in St. Paul, Minn., site of the NCAA Division II Volleyball Championship, making angels in the snow.

“The experience in itself was unbelievable,” Flagler volleyball coach Taylor Mott said. “That was one of the things that we tried to remind the girls to just enjoy every second of the experience. Whatever happens when we get there, enjoy every moment.”

Snow blanketed the ground outside the national quarterfinals site before the Saints were scheduled to play their Elite Eight matchup with Dowling University. Just as their coach had advised, the players, many of whom were born and raised in Florida, decided to soak it all in.

“That made the trip 10 times better to even have that experience,” senior Katie Beale said. The significance of such a milestone wasn’t lost on their coach.

“The surreal experience was just another chapter in what easily became the most memorable season, not in just Flagler College Volleyball history, but possibly in the history of Flagler College Athletics,” Mott said.

In just its second year competing in the NCAA, the Saints beat out many teams who have been in Division II for a long time without any of their teams advancing to or winning a regional.

“I definitely think we put Flagler on the map, and that’s a good thing for all of our teams,” she said.

To get to Minnesota, Flagler volleyball won both the Peach Belt Conference regular season and conference tournament titles in their first Peach Belt season, an unprecedented feat in itself. Then they bulldozed through the regional tournament, dropping just four sets in three matches and knocking off host Wingate in the final to advance to the quarterfinals.

“When we won regionals, it didn’t click for a lot of us for a while,” senior outside hitter Justine Burkhardt said. “On the bus ride back I remember just asking ‘Did that really just happen?’ It seemed like it all happened pretty fast and it just seemed so surreal.”

The win sent them to the national tournament, and after their adventures in the snow, Flagler dispatched Dowling in one of their best matches of the year, with a 3-0 sweep.

“We had a lot to prove,” Burkhardt said. “We were never ranked during the season, and we had played and beaten teams that were ranked, too. To beat Dowling once we were there, we all just played incredible. … That’s probably one of the best games we played all season. Everyone was doing their job so well that it made everyone else’s job that much easier.”

The victory sent Flagler to the final four, where they went on to lose their matchup with West Texas A&M, snapping a 29-match winning streak that began on Sept. 19 in Greenwood, S.C., with a victory over PBC rival Lander. The streak broke the Flagler record of 22, spanned 76 days and also tied a Peach Belt Conference record.

The team was motivated purely by the ability to play for a championship. Since joining NCAA Division II three years ago and before joining the Peach Belt, Flagler was ineligible for post-season play no matter how successful their season had been.

Our drive to make it as far as we could in our senior year really motivated the younger girls to help us,” Beale said. “We had so much fun playing together. That’s what kept our winning streak going. That’s what kept us going into the final four. I can’t imagine my senior year going any better.”

On top of the team accomplishments, the Saints received plenty of individual accolades as well. Mott was named Peach Belt Conference Coach of the Year. Beale was named to the NCAA Division II All-Southeast Region first team while Burkhardt and junior Meg Weathersby received second team honors.

Burkhardt also made the PBC All-Academic second team and shattered the Flagler College career records for sets played (545), kills (1881), attempts (5,573) and digs (1,676). It proved to be a truly unforgettable senior season for the St. Augustine native.

“Throughout the entire season — every practice, every game — I was just trying to soak it up as much as possible,” Burkhardt said. “It couldn’t have worked out any better. I guess you could say it was bittersweet. All of the games up to that we had all played so well and I don’t know that we all really clicked that last game. … But I’m not disappointed with how it ended. For us to get that far was absolutely incredible in itself.”

For Mott it was fulfilling to see her team’s constant drive reap the rewards they deserved.

“I don’t know that this season could have been any more rewarding and not so much because of the winning and all of that. That is a byproduct,” she said. “The most rewarding thing is seeing all the hard work pay off for a group of girls that didn’t know if we would ever be in a conference or even when we would be active Division II.”

Mike Galluzzi, ’88, is in the business of space. And right now the space business is in a period of transition.

The current shuttle program is set to retire by September 2010, leaving a gap in human space transportation for at least a few years while the new “Constellation” program takes off. Constellation’s plans echo the heyday of the space program with exploration of the moon and eventually manned missions to Mars.

One of Galluzzi’s jobs as NASA’s supply chain manager for the Explorations Systems Mission Directorate is to help ease the transition by streamlining common processes and eliminating redundancies — even looking at ways to use the resources on the lunar surface as part of the interplanetary supply chain. He calls it “designing for sustainment.”

“When you look at us going to the moon and beyond, I like to say ‘Spares are not an option,’ ” he said. “We really have to be focused on what we call the ‘ilities,’ which is reliability, maintainability, supportability and more importantly, affordability, and from an agency perspective, accountability.”

With the significant time gap between human space flight programs, it is unknown whether the companies that supply components of the shuttle will still be producing the same products. Galluzzi says this is the key to his line of work. It’s not just about streamlining current business practices. It’s also about ensuring these same processes can be applied to future programs as well.

“What we’re [NASA’s] designing today may be obsolete when we get up to production,” he said. “So it’s my job to ensure a healthy supply base and ensure that we’re flexible and agile enough to allow the engineering community to design in the next evolution or innovative product.”

At the end of the day, space exploration is still a business. But because of its unique challenges — NASA is entering uncharted territory with the Constellation program — existing business models don’t always apply. Missions to the moon are no longer a week-long “camping trip.” The goal is in-depth, long-term space exploration, and that creates new supply chain dilemmas. Any delay in parts or supplies increases exponentially the moment you leave Earth. Galluzzi has invented software that could help to solve some of those problems.

Prime Supplier™ is a one-of-a-kind supply chain simulation software, which NASA is pursuing a patent on. He developed the software to look at the percentage of business NASA generates for its suppliers, which are shared with the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry as a whole, and to help NASA determine mutually beneficial systems, pooling of resources, etc.

Galluzzi says his philosophy comes from a basic economic concept he learned at Flagler: supply and demand.

“How do you adjust to changing economic and customer demands?” he said. “That is essentially the foundation that I built everything else on, from Prime Supplier, to simulation, to possibly ultimately influencing policy for the agency.”

In an industry where the average civilian worker is an engineer, Galluzzi gets to use his knowledge of business to influence processes that could be used for years to come. But that career path wasn’t always clear.

After graduating from Flagler on a baseball scholarship, Galluzzi was somewhat torn. Within the course of two weeks he had three possible career options: play baseball in Italy, become an Air Force pilot or work in the space industry. Three choices that, in his mind, were dreams come true.

Galluzzi says the decision to join Rockwell International Space Systems Division and work as a logistics engineer on the environmental control and life support system for the space shuttle seemed like the best chance for a long-term career.

“I had the most unique opportunities fall into my lap,” he said. “Then the offer from Rockwell came. So I thought it’s time for me to quit playing around and grow up.”

Galluzzi has “grown up” immersed in business, from that first job at Rockwell, to returning to school for more specialized training, to owning his own company. It’s all helped him understand those basic supply and demand principles even more. But business models aside, Galluzzi really believes in the objectives of space exploration.

“When you start seeing the next vehicle … you start saying ‘Wow, I want more of this. We’ve got to do more.’ When I first stepped into the lunar rover (LER), I thought, ‘I want more … we need to go to Mars.’ We need to do all of these things, and the timeline, from my personal standpoint, is too long. We need to become agile and come up with quicker design and contracting processes.”

That includes looking out for the types of scenarios that will eliminate situations like on Apollo 13 when NASA scientists literally had to find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole because parts weren’t interchangeable.

It’s undeniably a tall order to fill, but Galluzzi tries to stay focused on the big picture.

“There are times when you just stand back [and realize the magnitude of what you are doing],” he said, “but I try not to let that happen. I must stay focused and not be so lost in the fog of admiration that you lose touch with what’s important. Literally people can get hurt if you don’t focus.”

Of course, when you spend your days “seeing what some might consider science fiction become reality,” it’s hard not to live every day in awe of your surroundings.

“We really do work with rocket scientists,” he said.

Audio Slideshow: Making Math Fun

It began simply enough: a collection of songs about math meant to help school kids learn their multiplication tables. But 2000 alumna Kat Vellos never expected the funky little album — with its hip-hop beats put to math-infused tunes and her own soulful voice — would end up in regular rotation on Sirius XM Satellite Radio.

Called “Musiplication,” the independent album released in 2008 weaves stories about canoeing pandas and superheroes with everyday multiplication.

And it has caught on. The music found a following of kids, parents and educators, and one of the songs — “5 on 5” — even topped Sirius XM’s Kids Place Live’s weekly countdown, sharing time with will.i.am’s track from the movie “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.”

“I just thought it was going to be a small thing and I could give it to the school where I was volunteering,” Vellos explained. “I had no idea that within three months of being released it would be on Sirius XM.”

How does a former graphic designer and spoken-word poet end up writing and recording a CD about, of all things, math?

It happened more by chance than anything — a result of trying to find a way to help kids better understand a subject Vellos herself has always struggled with. In 2005, she joined AmeriCorps, an organization that is part of the federal government’s Corporation for National and Community Service, which encourages service and volunteering. She moved to Seattle to help tutor elementary students in reading and, to her dismay, math.

“When I was a kid, and all the way through college, I struggled with math. It wasn’t my favorite at all,” she said. “That was my anxiety area as a kid.

“They just put me where I was needed most. I ended up finding, actually, that I was great at teaching math … I’m not a typical math brain, so I could explain it to kids in a way that they could understand.”

Vellos found that typical memorization of multiplication tables didn’t work for a lot of kids.

“A couple girls had a particularly hard time with it,” she recalled. “Yet, they knew the words to every Beyoncé song on the radio. I was like, ‘You know, there ought to be some way for them to learn their times tables through music.’ ”

When she couldn’t find any material or music about math that kids could relate to, she decided to make her own.

“Kids learn through so many different ways. They learn through stories and they learn through songs. … If you make it interesting, if you put in stories, if you put in imagination, if you put in creativity and music, it’s going to stick.”

The songs that ended up on “Musiplication” began as experiments in those tutoring sessions. Vellos said it was a natural fit, blending the world of spoken-word poetry that she loved so much with music and times tables. So she hatched the idea of taking the songs and turning them into a CD.

That’s where Jacksonville DJ and music producer Britt Traynham, better known as Batsauce, came in. The close friends had always talked about recording her poetry to his music.

It took about a year from beginning to end, and while she was thrilled with how it turned out, she never expected such a reception – or that after mailing a copy of it to an on-air personality at Sirius XM’s kids station, it would end up in regular rotation.

“It was really cool and unexpected,” she said. “All I did was put it out there.”

Now Vellos hears from parents and teachers all over the world. Her songs have been played on the radio in London, teachers have begun using the CD in classes, and she gets e-mail from as far away as Israel.

Where do the themes for her songs come from?

“Really, my mind is filled with cartoons,” she said with a laugh. “I had a lot of fun researching numbers when I sat down to do it. … I knew I wanted each number song to have its own personality or its own little story.”

In her songs, Vellos looked for ways to incorporate little stories about food, superheroes and animals around numbers and multiplication tables.

“I love language,” she said. “I love words. To me it’s kind of magical to be able to string together the syllables of the English language to create an experience for the person who hears it or reads it. It invigorates you and makes your mind come alive.”

From there, Vellos worked with Traynham to infuse hip-hop beats and an old school flavor. They give the album a unique and catchy sound that comes across as anything but kids’ music.

She said hears from a lot of parents who tell her not only is it helping their kids with math, but that the CD is also something they enjoy.

While she doesn’t foresee any new recordings in the near future, Vellos is now working on a “Musiplication” curriculum that she envisions as a learning workbook to go along with the CD.

Sánchez describes her art as “exploding optimism.” A colorful mix of shapes and textures, the effect is quite upbeat, but Sánchez, ’97, says that is rarely her intent.

“The movement and colors that are used take this happiness because of the colors,” she said. “And I don’t intentionally create happy paintings. That just comes out.”

To say she works in mixed media would be an understatement. Sánchez’s art is an intriguing medley of acrylic paint, markers, pens, highlighters, paint pens, cut paper, pencil and ink. She creates on both canvas and paper. But most surprising of all is what inspires her distinctly geometric work.

After graduating from Flagler with degrees in fine art and graphic design, Sánchez didn’t set off to start her career as an artist. Instead, she joined the Peace Corps.

“I wanted to serve, and I didn’t want to focus on me,” she said. “I joined the Peace Corps to get a different perspective on life and to serve the community.”

Those experiences had an effect on her art, but Sánchez says she didn’t realize it until a few years later.

“The colors in Africa really influenced my work,” she said. “I was in a rural mud hut, with a thatched roof, hours away from a city. I just couldn’t get over that three-quarters of my frame of vision was sky.”

She was equally entranced by the African lifestyle.

“There is no frivolity,” Sánchez said. “Everything you do in a day is to survive. You spend time going to get water, collecting wood for burning. I remember thinking that I was privileged that I could paint — that I had the materials and time that I could paint.”

And that freedom to paint has helped her earn a grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and a residency with the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation as well as exhibits in galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, to name a few. Ultimately, she credits her love of color and her understanding of it to a class she took at Flagler with art professor Don Martin.

“I got a lot of support at Flagler,” she said. “No one was competitive, like a lot of art schools can be. If someone’s strong point was color or sculpting in clay or casting, that was the person you went to for advice and help. Everyone played off everyone else’s strengths. Everyone helped each other.”

For more of Jennifer Sanchez’s art, visit www.miss-sanchez.com.

Communication professor talks about his days as a journalist in Havana, Cuba, meeting Fidel Castro and his thoughts on the future of the communist island

Slideshow: Cuba in Pictures

There’s a marker on the tip of Key West that proclaims Cuba a mere 90 miles south of American soil. As tourists stare out across the water trying to catch a glimpse of the communist nation, it seems as if the gulf between these two nations is bridgeable and small.

But distances can be misleading, as communication professor Tracey Eaton will tell you, and there is much more between the two countries than just water and miles.

An island he once called “strange and special, stirring and sad,” Cuba is saddled by years of communist rule and economic hardship, yet buoyed by an intense spirit, a strong sense of culture and above all, an electrifying zest for life.

Eaton will tell you there’s much more to Cuba once you scrape below the surface and get to know its politics, its people and its culture, all of which will also leave you scratching your head.

And Cuba is attracting renewed interest now that long-time ruler Fidel Castro — who Cubans often signified by stroking an imaginary beard with their hand — has stepped down and the political winds of American presidential politics are stirring. With Florida and its huge concentration of Cuban-Americans likely to figure prominently next November, presidential candidates have already begun laying out what their policies will be on Cuba.

That gives Eaton, who was one of the few — and first — American journalists to report regularly from Cuba, a unique perspective on the communist country’s future.

“I think the Cuban government is stronger than a lot of people who haven’t lived
there think,” he said. “It has controlled so many aspects of everyday Cuban lives. The demise of [Fidel] Castro won’t really mean the demise of the government, which is set up to sustain itself politically.”

It was in 2000 that Eaton set up shop in Havana Vieja as a correspondent and bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News — one of only five American news organizations that the Cuban government had permitted to report from its soil.

“This was no ordinary island,” Eaton wrote in a farewell piece after The Morning News re-assigned him after almost five years, and some 28 reporting trips before that.

It’s a country that is a mystery to most Americans — a land best known for its larger-than-life revolutionary leader, and made famous by Hemingway, memories of the heyday ’50s, pungent cigars as thick as sausages and the captivating sounds of its folk music and salsa.

“Cuba has seemed like it has been in a time capsule,” Eaton said in a recent interview, talking about everything from the 1950s American autos that still prowl the streets to its colonial architecture. “I think now it really is changing. Just how much, we’ll see.”

Castro ruled the communist nation since leading a rag-tag band of revolutionaries to power in 1959. But with his health failing, the 81-year-old stepped down as president in February and handed the reigns of the tight-fisted government (and its sputtering economy) to his younger brother, Raul.

Raul has led Cuba’s military for the past 50 years and is seen by some to be more willing to embrace change for the island. Even so, Cuba continues to struggle years after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had helped subsidize its economy. Others doubt that the younger Castro will make any significant changes at all, especially on critical issues like bringing about democracy, improving human rights, allowing capitalism to thrive, or loosening the clamp-down on opposition leaders and Cuban journalists.

“I think it’s real difficult to predict what will happen in Cuba in the future,” Eaton said. “Raul is much more pragmatic, and not as much an ideologue as his brother. He has to know that some of the things he’s doing will make people [in Cuba] happier.”

And he has loosened some restrictions on Cubans, allowing them to own cell phones and stay in expensive hotels once reserved for foreigners, if they can afford them. But so far there has been nothing more substantial.

For those reasons, Eaton doesn’t subscribe to the belief that once the Castro regime is gone, the communist government will crumble and democracy will suddenly flourish.

“I don’t necessarily see people rising up [because Castro is gone],” he said. “A lot of things are business as usual. There’s no revolt in the streets. Why would things be so different when he dies?”

Part of the issue, he says, is that the Cuban revolution that Castro launched and sustained for almost five decades is not so much a Socialist or Marxist revolution, but instead a nationalist revolution.

“It’s about being independent and free from foreign rule,” he said, which is part of why many Cubans, even living under harsh economic conditions and numerous state controls, still feel a bond with the revolution, and Castro himself.

Eaton said Fidel’s grip on the nation for half a century inspired great loyalty among Cubans, as well as great fear.

“There’s a whole cult of personality surrounding Fidel,” Eaton said. He remembers the first time he
got a chance to meet the bearded revolutionary: at a reception for American businessmen in Havana.

“Just to watch him work the room, he’s a master politician,” Eaton said. “When he’s talking to you, he makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room, and he’s very charismatic.”

Eaton left the journalism world in the fall of 2007 to join Flagler’s Communication Department and teach a future generation of journalists the art of newsgathering.

“I miss the action, and I miss kind of being at the center of things,” he said about leaving a career that spanned 24 years. “But I’m really enjoying it here.”

The “center of things” was a journalist’s cornucopia of assignments ranging from Cuba to assignments in Mexico, Haiti, the Middle East and even Afghanistan after U.S. forces struck at the Taliban following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Before Flagler, he worked for The Houston Chronicle, where he had been the Mexico/border editor and later the metro editor. He became somewhat of a specialist investigating Mexican drug cartels, organized crime and political corruption.

Fluent in Spanish, he had always wanted to cover Latin America, and began his career working for the The Miami Herald and The Orange County Register before moving to The Morning News.

“My goal was to be a foreign correspondent,” he said. The Dallas paper sent him to their Mexico City bureau in the early 1990s, just as Mexico started making international headlines, all beginning with the Zapatista uprising.

But it was Cuba — a land that few Americans are allowed to visit thanks to a U.S. travel ban — that fascinated him the most. Eaton first journeyed there in 1994 on assignment for The Morning News, which was trying to broaden its coverage of Latin America.

“We were really trying to raise the profile of the newspaper and take the place of The Miami Herald in Latin America,” he said.

After seven “very difficult” years of trying to open a bureau in Cuba, Eaton moved there permanently in 2000 to get a taste of the troubles a foreign journalist can have while trying to report on a media-adverse communist government. Cuban media is all state-controlled and primarily government propaganda — a far cry from the kind of journalism Eaton practiced.

“We wrote about economic and social problems in Cuba, which were often scathing and hard-hitting,” Eaton said. “That didn’t sit well with the Cuban government. But we couldn’t compromise and write fluff. We wanted to write what we felt was the truth [about Cuba].”

While it didn’t sit well, Eaton wrote it anyway, even if it meant occasional calls to visit the Foreign Ministry where a Cuban official would explain to him why a story was unfair or incorrect. But he said he was never censored or pressured to write pro-Cuba stories, and his travel was never limited. Cuban journalists don’t have it so well, he noted. In 2003, he wrote about how the government rounded up more than a dozen journalists and sent them off
to prison.

Eaton’s time in Cuba left him somewhat conflicted about the nation — on the one hand trying to understand its repressive and dictatorial grasp on the people, and on the other marveling at the Cuban people’s resourcefulness, pride, generosity and resilience.

There’s a much greater sense of community there — of culture and of unity — than you find in many other countries, he said. His wife is Cuban, and that has also given him greater insight into the island.

“People are poor in Cuba, but everyone is poor. You don’t have the rich exploiting the poor,” he said.

It would be great if you could take what’s good about capitalism and what’s good about their system and combine them.”

He recognizes that’s probably wishful thinking, and that change will come to Cuba — in many ways it has already started. The bigger question in his mind is in what form it will come, and how much it will change a “strange and special” island that has become so close to him.

Hooker, a 2002 Flagler graduate living in Seoul, South Korea, only began rock climbing a little more than a year ago. But he quickly found a passion for nature and exploration that’s taken him to the top of some of the world’s tallest peaks, including Alaska’s Mount McKinley, 14,400-foot Mount Rainier in Washington, 19,300-foot Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and a 13,000-foot volcano in Indonesia.

“It’s definitely been a big uphill climb the whole way,” Hooker said, pun intended.

The communication and English major spent much of the last two years working as a server and bartender, all the time saving up money for his next travel adventure. When he discovered the thrill of mountain climbing, he was working as an English teacher in the South Korean capital.

In February 2006, he enrolled in a five-week rock-climbing course. He figured his next step would be a backpacking course, but that evolved into expedition climbing instead – which sparked his passion to conquer North America’s tallest peak.

“I had this crazy idea in the back of my head I’d be able to climb Mount McKinley,” Hooker said. “But the more I found out about it, it became more feasible.”

That’s probably because it wasn’t his first expedition climb. Expedition climbs can last several weeks and climbers carry everything they need to make camp and, more importantly, to survive each night. When Hooker began training for the McKinley climb, he’d already scaled Mount Rainier and Mount Kilimanjaro.

But McKinley was Hooker’s most rewarding climbing experience to date – and the most difficult. The 20,300-foot climb to the summit took a total of 14 days. Along the way, Hooker’s group got word of two climbers who had died while attempting the climb just days before.

“Our own summit attempt was a living hell,” Hooker wrote in his blog. “When you see these guys climbing on TV, you just can’t imagine how tough it is climbing in the thin air.”

Within the first hour, he was having trouble breathing because of the altitude and cold. He contracted frostbite on his nose and fingers that resulted in long-term effects – months later, his fingertips would still get numb easily when he got cold. Although the first 14,000 feet were like climbing ski slopes, Hooker said, the terrain became much more dangerous from there.

When they made camp at 17,000 feet, Hooker’s group had to build a wall of ice to act as a shield between them and the 40 mph winds swirling about them. They witnessed helicopter rescues of injured or stranded climbers.

After they finally reached the summit on day 14, the climbers immediately began the 12-hour trek back to camp for the night. But the weather became even more dangerous. The group experienced whiteout conditions and some of the most hazardous, icy landscape they had seen.

“We summited on one of the worst days of the year and nearly fell 13,000 feet because of it,” Hooker said.

Two of the climbers with Hooker lost their footing on an icy patch on the face of the mountain. Hooker, remembering the guides had told them they were in a “No Fall Zone” — a place too dangerous to fall — tried to dig the pick of his ax into the surface, but the snow was too soft.

Thankfully, they had anchored their lines to a picket earlier, and the friction from the tether was able to stop their fall very near to a 13,000-foot drop off.

The relatively small drop they made was enough to leave the two climbers wide-eyed and shaken. And Hooker himself gasped for air for several minutes after the fall, thanks to the adrenalin and the high altitude.

The next day’s descent turned out to be much less eventful, but all the more rewarding. Spring had begun to take hold in Alaska in the two weeks it took them to scale the mountain, and the sense of accomplishment that Hooker felt enhanced the landscape.

Hooker said it best in his blog: “We stepped out of our small plane on the airstrip into warm sunny air and smelled the wonderful aroma of Alaska budding in the Spring and began to strip off the layers that had glued to our bodies over the last couple weeks. I was ready to go home and tell everyone about this unbelievable adventure.”

Now Hooker is working at a modern English institute that pays for his apartment and unknowingly helps fund his adventures. He teaches English to Seoul’s affluent, including business executives, university students, professors and even a monk.

“I try to save up as much as I can and then rely on the credit card when I have to,” he said. “I’ll pay it off in the future.”

What about Hooker’s future travel plans?

“I want to get out and see nature more,” he said.

His next mountain-climbing expedition will be Mount Aconcagua, the tallest peak in South America at 22,000 feet. He hopes to climb it in February 2008 — if his “investor” cooperates.

“It all depends if I can get off [work],” Hooker said.

Mike Fretto’s story begins with a trip to New Orleans in 2005.

He went to tour areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and came away with an idea that spawned a unique non-profit that uses T-shirts to change lives. Now his story includes a recent trip to the Oscars to promote the idea (see sidebar).

The 2004 graduate saw with his own eyes the vast devastation from Katrina: homes destroyed, neighborhoods uprooted, lives changed. But what really moved him were the individuals who were affected, the people whose lives were changed.

While working with Flagler’s Intervarsity Club gutting houses in the hardest hit areas, Fretto discovered helping one person at a time felt much more tangible than trying to fight a more abstract cause. Stripping moldy drywall may have been a small act in the grand scheme, but it helped – one family at a time. And that became the driving principle of Rosa Loves.

The concept is simple. Rosa Loves is about helping people, one story at a time, but in a unique way – by designing and selling trendy T-shirts.

Formed in 2006 by Fretto, a graphic design major, and friend Chris Lewis, a software developer, Rosa Loves seeks to provide financial support to those in need by creating and selling limitededition T-shirts. Their goal is to offer a “new perspective of how clothing can serve a purpose other than outfitting.”

To do this, each shirt is designed for a particular story and only enough are made to cover a particular need. But Fretto is quick to point out that Rosa Loves is less about charity and more about awareness, faces and names. That’s why the stories are printed on the inside of the shirt, next to the heart.

Most of those stories are brought to Rosa Loves by friends of Fretto, Lewis, and business partners Johnpaul McLean and Erin Pate Lewis (‘04). Flagler alumni Jeremy Dean (‘02), Russell Brownley (‘03) and Ty Williams (‘07) have also contributed stories and designs to Rosa Loves, along with St. Augustine residents like Kelly Westropp and Eric Hires.

“The one thing I really like about our stories is that they’re connected with friends,” Fretto said.

Those stories have included a community leader in West Augustine who was in need of a new walker; a fisherman in Indonesia who, surprisingly, did not own a fishing boat; a family who lost their historic West Augustine home to a devastating fire; and an organization that goes beyond scholarships to help poor students in rural Mexico attend college.

Like many of the Rosa Loves stories, one of their more recent came from a friend: Brownley, while filming a documentary in South Africa for www.walkingonwater.com. The focus of Rosa’s “love” in this case is a group of young surfers from Mossel Bay, who Brownley says are like “fish in the water.”

“The irony here is that these kids are a product of South Africa, a country that has such a turbulent past,” Brownley said. “Many of them come from broken homes, sometimes with no mother or father, from communities that have been ravaged by racism, AIDS and drugs. But today, they were surfers, and for an instant, all that faded away.”

For this group, surfing is an escape – a way to forget about their problems and erase the race barrier.

“These people are living a life we, as upper-middle class, don’t understand,” Fretto said. “They’re locked in. Surfing is their way out.”

The goal of this story, and the corresponding T-shirt, is to help this group of young South Africans pay for surfboards, wet suits and other supplies.

Fretto says he hopes to see the idea grow beyond the stories they have already told.

“We have so many goals,” Fretto said. “We’re really just trying to use our talents and our gifts to do something tangible rather than dumping our abilities into something that is just going to fizzle out in the long run. T-shirts are just the beginning.” They hope to use the Internet to get more people involved with Rosa Loves by submitting their own ideas and creating similar projects.

“I’m not a business man, but I see a lot of changes in the business world,” Fretto said. “I really think people are starting to realize that there’s a lot of wealth, especially in this country and there’s a lot of ways to build and structure a business so it is mindful and productive to not only self profit, but really help the community the business is in, help the world and help the environment. We’re finding that out as we go.

“It’s tough, because we’re just doing this out of my living room,” he said. But he is quick to credit his friends and fellow Rosa Loves creators.

From an idea that began on a street in New Orleans in the wake of extreme tragedy, to a T-shirt company with a meaningful purpose, Fretto’s story is one of action.

“You can really make a huge difference for somebody, one-onone,” Fretto said. “We can do small things, even if it’s just listening to someone. I think that’s the whole idea behind Rosa Loves. Such a small thing is making a big difference, and everybody has a story.”