Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.
KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.Since 1981, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has served as the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, collaborating with the Presidio Trust, partners, donors, and the community to support the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). The GGNRA stretches across three Bay Area counties, north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge, and includes iconic places such as Muir Woods National Monument, Fort Point National Historic Site, Alcatraz Island, Crissy Field, Mori Point, Lands End, and the Presidio of San Francisco.
Presidio Nursery is a cooperative program of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, National Parks Service, and Presidio Trust.
Since September 2023, I have done transplanting, pruning, and pot washing and look forward to work in the seed lab during winter 🥼 🌱
These are some of the other tasks available for volunteers at the Presidio Nursery:
seed collection
seed cleaning
transplanting
pruning
weeding
composting
pot washing
nursery maintenance
care of an educational garden
This international biodiversity hot spot grows 150 plant species and 150,000 plants a year for habitat restoration and reforestation around the Presidio and other parks.
Among other places, you can enjoy their plants at the new Tunnel Tops park at Speaker Nancy Pelosi Plaza. Thanks to Pelosi’s initiative to save the Presidio for the people, the Presidio was designated a National Park 30 years ago.
One afternoon we handled newly discovered Franciscan manzanita that had been cloned for repopulating the Presidio with the species. We washed 100 pots for them to be repotted into later (after steaming, sterilizing, bleaching) these plants are the only ones that exist other than the mother plant.
A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.
The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!
I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.
By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.
Remembering the time when I conceived, pitched, wrote, sold, published a three page story in a top newsweekly magazine out of Hong Kong that highlighted a historical building at risk from nearby development to 93,000 elite members of government, business and the arts.
The article had impact.
The year after the article was published, the building won a newly created UNESCO Heritage Award.
To promote the conservation of the greatest diversity of the region’s built heritage, in the year 2000 UNESCO inaugurated the annual Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, a program designed to respond to the question: “Within the realities of contemporary, fast-track development, what of the built heritage do Asians value and want to preserve from the past to inform the region’s place in the global future?”
quoted from TheSiamSociety.org Lessons from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation: International Best Practices in Thailand
Richard Engelhardt, Montira Horayangura Unakul and Julia Davies
In 2018 you saw this historic property in the film Crazy Rich Asians, which used it as a setting.
You know it from Crazy Rich Asians. I championed its story in 1998.
“Her groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.”
I founded GlobalNiche in Istanbul with Tara Agacayak after evolving my 2006 cultural book to a 2010 global citizen blog to an online skill building business, and Tanya Monsef joined us when I moved to San Francisco. Here’s what Tanya, the Dean's Executive Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University for the past decade, says about GlobalNiche in 2024.
Watch a quick retrospective, excuse any missing media.
"Anastasia’s groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.
Tanya recalls how I took my knowledge and prior success using book publishing’s “author platform” concept to reach the public with content marketing, branding and community outreach (that’s Expat Harem!), and combined it with the heavily-online techniques a serial expat like me has relied on during my overseas experiences, and then how I created a way to teach it to others, and then to scale it.
"GlobalNiche was a forward-thinking leader in digital solutions and thought leader to a global cohort of founders and business women, as well as organizations serving female innovators.”
This reminds me that Tanya and I continued to deliver talks and workshops well into 2014 and later, working with the Women’s Startup Lab in Mountain View, Turkish Women’s International Network in Menlo Park, and a women executives group at Cisco in San Jose, and I’ve guest lectured to her business students at Santa Clara University for several years.
““Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing an ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity. ”
"Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing her ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity,” she says.
"GlobalNiche was awarded Top Instructor by Udemy in 2013 as the most enrolled course.” You’ll see in the quick video above that Udemy noted we enrolled students from 17 nations in 2013.
Tanya recalls our 2013 win of an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women by national and international gender equality foundations, global health nonprofits, and academic leadership centers.
The multi-year strategic change initiative of San Jose State University, Public Health Institute (PHI), World Pulse, the Global Women's Leadership Network, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Global Fund for Women recognized GlobalNiche's pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools for connecting and transforming communities world-wide.
“In 2013 GlobalNiche won an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women, recognition of a pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools.”
“I’m proud to have added definition to, contributed to & participated in the movement toward every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting and creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone, the incorporation of location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers, a new seriousness around digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking in general for personal and professional development, reinvisioning the future of work with online collaboration and cocreation, the adoption of global communication best practices, the absolute tidal wave of online content marketing, the rise of the transformational consumer.”
