Greenbelt Alliance's recently published Smart Infill: A practical guide to creating vibrant places throughout the Bay Area  was written to inform decision makers about the benefits of these policies, and cite examples where they have been successfully employed. One of them, says Daisy Pistey-Lyhne, is the Town of Windsor.

Sonoma County has been a leader in adopting community separators or Urban Growth Boundaries for its cities. Those are a key first step in redirecting growth away from sprawl patterns back into urban infill.

For more information about the Sonoma County branch of Greenbelt Alliance, click here .

Greenbelt Alliance also regularly hosts hikes throughout the BayArea. You'll find a list of upcoming events here.

Cornelius Bracy, a formerly homeless  soccer player from Sonoma County, will be  part of the American team at the Homeless World Cup that takes place in Australia next month. The Homeless World Cup began in 2003 as a "catalyst for lasting change through the development of street soccer worldwide in a way that creates maximum social impact for the players involved--the socially excluded, homeless people and people living in poverty."

Julius Ujeh, a soccer coach from Nigeria, began a Street Soccer league for homeless young adults in Sonoma County. The program, originally started in Australia, has given young adults a purpose that teaches discipline and self-motivation. 

Street soccer is a mini-version of the traditional game of soccer, which can be played on any hard, flat rectangular surface, roughly the size of a tennis court. The new "traveling field" (shown below) gives the U.S. team an attractive, safe surface on which to play, and a sense of identity for the players.

Four players compete on each side (one of them is a goalie) and games last for 14 minutes each. While games are short, they are very fast-paced. The name of the event was coined in 2003 during the first Homeless World Cup.

From the Sacramento River delta to the wilds of California's national parks, Michael Muir is helping urban wheelchair users maintain contact with the great outdoors.

Michael Muir is the Director of Access Adventure,  whose mission is "to provide outdoor recreation, environmental education and open space access to underserved youth and people with disabilities, using innovative wheelchair accessible horse-drawn carriages."

Access Adventure will be joining other organizations at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds on October 24^th for the Disability Services and Legal Center Tech Expo. For more info about this event, click here.

There are many equestrian programs for people with disabilities, but Muir says Access Adventure is different, and can complement hippotherapy activites.

Opus has been a part of Breathed's creative world for three decades, but the cartoonist says his original choice of a penguin as a featured character was driven by some quite practical considerations.

 What will happen to Opus when his days in the comics come to an end? Readers are invited to guess in a nationwide contest that ends TONIGHT.

Berkeley Breathed is a screenwriter, author, cartoonist, and one of America's most popular illustrators.  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1987, Breathed is perhaps best known for his comic strip Bloom County, which ran for nine years and appeared in over 1,200 newspapers all over the world. Now that he is moving into other realms of  more collaborative endeavors, Breathed is bracing for the loss of autonomy he enjoyed as a cartoonist.

 To find out more about his new children's book Pete and Pickles, click here .

Berkely Breathed will make a rare Northern California public appearance Oct. 18 at the Charles M. Schulz museum in Santa Rosa. Get details here .