Phil Smeltzer, president of Comfort Zone Products
My wife Hazel and I have been working with Special Needs children for the past 20 years. I am also the president of Comfort Zone Products a new company based in Langley BC.

All three of our foster children have cerebral palsy and are confined to wheelchairs. Two of them are fed through a tube in their stomach. They also have other disabilities that make our job a 24/7 commitment. If you came to visit the children you would see amongst the varied medical equipment three very happy and likable kids who teach us a lot more about life than we teach them.

We even have a nurse accompany one little girl to school each day because of her need for 24-hour oxygen supply. Yet we would not trade our job with anyone because of the great deal of satisfaction we get from these fantastic children.

This job also requires a lot of lifting as you can well imagine, and the wear and tear on our bodies over the years can sometimes develop into other problems such as the need for chiropractic help and physiotherapy. A year ago I began to feel pain developing in my mid back region and after consultation with doctors and a bone scan, I was diagnosed with arthritis. Pain pills did not offer a viable solution and I needed a good night’s sleep.

The solution was a newly developed product called Syn.flex, a natural liquid glucosamine product that did not cure arthritis but removed the pain associated with it. I can now continue to work and play with our truly special children and give them the time and attention they need. It was my experience with Syn.flex that led me to start Comfort Zone Products, allowing us to share this discovery with others.

The Harrop-Procter Community Co-operative
We are a not for profit business run by the communities of Harrop and Procter on Kootenay Lake B.C. near Nelson. The company was created in 1999 to protect the local watersheds from clear-cut logging and enrich the local economy.

We operate a pilot community forest agreement, one of ten in the province. The provincial government created these agreements in 1999 to allow communities to develop personalized forest plans for their local area. The company has a board of directors who have volunteered many hours to the business. It also has a staff and contractors of between 5 and 15 people, depending on the season. We hire many young people within the organization. The Co-operative formed two companies, Harrop-Procter Forest Products and Sunshine Bay Botanicals. Visit the web site

Imagine a jewel blue lake set between lush, green mountains adorned with a mantle of deep green, cedar, hemlock, fir, larch, pine, birch and spruce trees. It is against this backdrop that Harrop-Procter Forest Products uses eco-system based forest management to extract timber from the 100-year-old forests. This method of forestry was developed by the Silva Forest Foundation, who have dedicated the last two decades to creating sustainable forest plans. The wood will soon be eco-certified.

Sunshine Bay Botanicals operates on certified organic farms at the base of the mountains on fields donated by area residents.

People like to feel a connection to the products they purchase. At Harrop-Procter Forest Products and Sunshine Bay Botanicals we focus on this need by producing carefully crafted wood products for home building and decorating and high quality traditional organic herbal products, such as tinctures, teas, culinary blends and small batch bulk herb sales.

Nancy Fischer, co-founder and executive director of the Westcoast Sacred Arts Society
I am a singer, teacher and parent, as well as director of the organization that hosts Vancouver’s Sacred World Music Festival. For years I was also a seeker, an artist looking for a genre and musical community that felt like home.

A friend once told me that being a vocalist in Vancouver meant recording the music from your heart from Monday to Thursday and singing “Johnny B. Goode” in bars on the weekend. Well, I really didn’t want to sell beer with my voice and certainly couldn’t come through with the attitude on stage. Instead I delved into opera and classical music; satisfying musically, but still devoid of the heart connection that I craved. When my first daughter was born I abandoned the idea of performing for the next five years.

Then one night, when I attended a concert by Paul Winter Consort performing the Misa Gaia, I heard Susan Osborne sing “Mystery,” and my world changed. I wept from the opening bar to the very last note. The next day I began to sing again and never looked back.

Ten years later I found myself in the company of some of Vancouver’s finest world music artists presenting evenings of Rumi and Lalla poetry and music. But where were the venues for sacred music outside of churches, temples and synagogues?

It was from this passion to create a venue for artists from diverse spiritual traditions that the Sacred World Music Festival was born. With the blessings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1999, our festival became the Canadian link to celebrating sacred music around the planet. Together with like-minded artists, dedicated volunteers and supporters, we carry the torch to this day. Outside of the renowned festival in Fes, Morocco, Vancouver is the only city in the world to continue the sacred music festival movement year after year.

Creating a forum for inter-cultural understanding and inter-faith dialogue continues to be my passion and spiritual practice. My CD, The Last Arrow, has songs from eight different traditions in nine languages. I still don’t know the words to “Johnny B. Goode.”