It all begins with an idea.

“My mom crawled behind me while I hopped down the boulders lining the valley of a mountain.”

The honest beginning of SumDay began on a class field trip to Hawk Mountain, a place in Pennsylvania that serves as a major landmark for raptors during their migrations throughout the year.  It was the first meaningful experience Angelo ever had in a natural preserve. That field trip created his deep connection to the natural world and established a lifelong commitment to its preservation.

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”  -Jane Goodall

When Angelo’s daughter, Sophie, was born, he, like many parents, found the fire alarms of the climate crisis more difficult to silence, and the loudest of them were in his backyard.  And so, the idea of the SumDay Project was born.  

Angelo’s passion for the environment, education, and the outdoors fueled his vision for an organization that provides a sense of belonging and empowerment for communities to make small-scale changes to cause a large-scale chain reaction, so the sum of actions can be the SumDay of our planet’s health.

“The greatest environmental problem is at the feet of a generation that has the least culpability in the matter, faces the greatest resistance to change, and wants to do everything about it.”  - Angelo Melendez III

We are just getting started!  SumDay’s purpose is to be the safetynet for local ecosystems, and our commitment to providing tools, resources, and educational programs is the underpinning of ecologically sustainable actions that contribute to healthy community environments.  Improving the health of our planet is at the heart of SumDay’s mission.  Inspiring the generations of today and tomorrow to show us how to do it is how we’ll get there.