A steel mill in Sweden. Photo by Uwe Niggemeier

The seed for what would become Radical Joy for Hard Times in 2008 was actually planted two decades earlier.

At the time, RadJoy founder Trebbe Johnson was living in New York, writing scripts and producing soundtracks for multimedia productions. Every year for about five years she worked with a small team of people to create a presentation for IBM about an inspiring person or group of people, and it would be shown at a big event for the company's top salespeople.

In 1987, while poring through periodicals in the New York Public Library in search of ideas, Trebbe read an article about an Oneida Indian engineer, David Powless, who had received a National Science Foundation grant to develop a process for recycling hazardous waste from steel mills. When she interviewed David, he told this story:

After receiving the grant, he drove out to an enormous mound of steel waste at the Kaiser Steel plant in California and scrambled to the top with two empty buckets that he would fill with samples to analyze in his lab. Triumphantly, he declared to the waste, "I will conquer you!"

By the time he got back to his car, however, he knew that this approach was all wrong. "I realized that the waste wasn't an enemy," he said. "It was an orphan, and my job was to bring it back to the circle of life."

Trebbe was intrigued with this new way of thinking about places that are abandoned, damaged, and cast aside. It launched her search for some way that all people could participate in to bring attention, compassion and beauty to such places.