Greetings Glocal Citizens!

For more than 25 years, my guest, Patricia Wilkins has worked across the United States and Ghana at the intersection of education, community development, youth opportunity, workforce development and social impact. As Founder and CEO of BASICS International, a nonprofit organisation committed to breaking cycles of poverty by creating pathways to education, opportunity and self-sustainability, her journey to this work has not been traditional.

She began her professional career in New York's fashion industry, working in fashion production and textiles before eventually leaving corporate America and moving into international service. Her work took her from New York to Russia and West Africa.

With a strong belief that where a child is born should never determine how far they can go, Patricia has been putting this belief into practice impacting 300,000 lives as BASICS celebrates 25 years of service to Ghanaian families.

In addition to her community development work, last year she penned her first book, So You Started a Nonprofit… Now What? - a practical and honest reflection on the realities of building and sustaining mission-driven organizations. As an author, social entrepreneur and creative, she is especially interested in the space where community, culture, technology, storytelling and good ideas come together to create meaningful change. And this what your’ll hear shine through in our conversation.

Where to find Patricia and BASICS International?
On LinkedIn + here
On Instagram
On Facebook
On YouTube
Show your support BASICS here!

What’s Patricia playing?
Magnetic Chess
Othello
Phase 10
Left Center Right

Other topics of interest:
A Brooklyn Story on Winthrop Street
A brief guide to Flatbush, Brooklyn
A short story about Chorkor, Ghana
About Camp Aklowah
About Shai Hills, Ghana
About Liberia’s Civil Wars
Abouth the Congo People, Americo-Liberians

Special Guest: Patricia Wilkins.

Greetings Glocal Citizens!

This week we’re back to Borderless Building with Black Women in Real Estate. So far this year we’ve showcased the personal and professional journeys of Black women in careers spanning project design, development, investor relations and community engagement with experience from as far east as Japan to the western United States. This week we’re taking a grip down south--south east to be more precise with a finance professional doubling as a farmer. She truly embodies the spirit of land stewardship.
Chanell Henry is a British-Jamaican entrepreneur, with a background in investment operations across hedge funds and asset management in London. After several years working in finance, Chanell made the decision to channel her commercial and investment experience into agriculture, co-founding Clarendon Gold Limited - a 100-acre commercial orchard, with her father, Vendrys Henry.
Together, they are applying all of their crafts and learning all things commercial orchard farm in Clarendon, Jamaica, where their primary crop is ackee - Jamaica’s national fruit. All the while, they are also building the infrastructure, team and commercial relationships needed to develop a wider agricultural business. Self-funded with over £300,000 invested to date, Clarendon Gold is being built with a long-term vision spanning cultivation, processing, packaging and export.
Chanell’s journey reflects her commitment to connecting diaspora capital and expertise with productive opportunities in Jamaica, while contributing to local employment and the development of Jamaica’s agricultural value chain.

Where to find Chanell?
On the farm @ Clarendon Gold

What’s Chanell reading, watching and listening to?
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Educated: a memoir by Tara Westover
The Office
Michael, the movie

Other topics of interest:
South East London Flavour
About Clarendon, Jamaica
Jamaica’s Argo Parks Initiative
About Grace Kennedy
A documentary about Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa

Greetings Glocal Citizens!

In this two-part conversation, Natasha Johnson, shares her impressive experience in both the nonprofit and academic sectors. For over two decades, she has been an activist, educator, lawyer, and artist working primarily on intersectional gender justice. She served as the executive director of several nonprofit organizations, as an anti-trafficking legal specialist drafting reform legislation in the Solomon Islands, and as a director of education working to support homeless LGBTQ youth. She is skilled at creating arts-based programming that integrates human rights and social justice awareness in elementary through graduate school environments. She has also taught courses in law, ethics, policy, civic engagement, education, nonprofit leadership, business development, and more. in her scholarly roles, she has been a professor and a director of academic programs at multiple colleges and universities, including Metropolitan College, St. Joseph’s College, Adelphi University, and Medgar Evers College.

In 2015, she founded Globalizing Gender, a nonprofit organization committed to creating a just world and preventing gender-based violence through capacity building, law, governance, and awareness. In 2018, she organized New York City’s inaugural march to end female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in the United States and was one of the lead contributors to a local statute that created a mayoral-appointed culturally aware task force on FGM/C, the first of its kind in the country.

After years of selfless work in diverse communities across the globe, Natasha is at an inflection point in her career and we’re fortunate to get a glimpse of how she’s approaching finding and settling into a new next.

Where to find Natasha?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
Her TEDxFlatbush Talk on YouTube

What’s Natasha reading?
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
The Revelation of Dionne Daphne by Mara Brock Akil
Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Other topics of interest:
About Flatbush, Brooklyn
About Brooklyn’s oldest High School - Boys and Girls High School
About the Solomon Islands
Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian peoples of the Pacific
Revist Glocal Citizen, Brigitte Perenyi’s own personal experience in the trokosi system
What defines Gender-based Violence?
What is FGM/C?
What is a B-Corp?
About Tower Records

Special Guest: Natasha R. Johnson.

Greetings Glocal Citizens!

In this two-part conversation, Natasha Johnson, shares her impressive experience in both the nonprofit and academic sectors. For over two decades, she has been an activist, educator, lawyer, and artist working primarily on intersectional gender justice. She served as the executive director of several nonprofit organizations, as an anti-trafficking legal specialist drafting reform legislation in the Solomon Islands, and as a director of education working to support homeless LGBTQ youth. She is skilled at creating arts-based programming that integrates human rights and social justice awareness in elementary through graduate school environments. She has also taught courses in law, ethics, policy, civic engagement, education, nonprofit leadership, business development, and more. in her scholarly roles, she has been a professor and a director of academic programs at multiple colleges and universities, including Metropolitan College, St. Joseph’s College, Adelphi University, and Medgar Evers College.

In 2015, she founded Globalizing Gender, a nonprofit organization committed to creating a just world and preventing gender-based violence through capacity building, law, governance, and awareness. In 2018, she organized New York City’s inaugural march to end female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in the United States and was one of the lead contributors to a local statute that created a mayoral-appointed culturally aware task force on FGM/C, the first of its kind in the country.

After years of selfless work in diverse communities across the globe, Natasha is at an inflection point in her career and we’re fortunate to get a glimpse of how she’s approaching finding and settling into a new next.

Where to find Natasha?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
Her TEDxFlatbush Talk on YouTube

What’s Natasha reading?
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
The Revelation of Dionne Daphne by Mara Brock Akil
Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Other topics of interest:
About Flatbush, Brooklyn
About Brooklyn’s oldest High School - Boys and Girls High School
About the Solomon Islands
Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian peoples of the Pacific
Revist Glocal Citizen, Brigitte Perenyi’s own personal experience in the trokosi system
What defines Gender-based Violence?
What is FGM/C?
What is a B-Corp?
About Tower Records

Special Guest: Natasha R. Johnson.

Greetings Glocal Citizens!

This week’s encore episode revisits a conversation with a fellow teammate and black woman in real estate, motivational speaker, 5-time Olympian representing the Bahamas, and #ChocolateCardinal, Jacqueline "Jackie" Edwards-Flowers.

As an adjunct to our collaboration with Black Women in Real Estate, which, so far taken us from London, via Nigeria and Barbados, to The South Bronx in the United States. Keeping local in the US, we’re traveling across the country from New York to California, via the Bahamas (and Jamaica) where we get into real estate from the value-added perspective. With a professional background spanning competitive sports, personal training, entrepreneurship--she founded a compressions socks company, and event planning, Jackie’s path in real estate is grounded in the know how and passion to apply her marketing, design and project management skills in getting to “Sold!”

Be sure to continue following our #BorderlessBuilding series, back next month, with another scaffolding conversation and Pan-African women’s real estate story (pun in tended 😉).

Where to find Jackie?
Gold Medal Home Staging and Design
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
On Thumbtack
On Wikipedia

What's Jackie watching?
HGTV
The Bachelorette
The Bachelor
The Real Housewives of Atlanta

What's Jackie reading?
Crushing: God Turns Pressure into Power by T.D. Jakes

Other topics of interest:
Thomas Robinson Stadium
Frank Rutherford
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Brooks Johnson
Mike Powell
Meet Dr. Ross Flowers
Altra Running Shoes

Special Guest: Jacqueline "Jackie" Edwards-Flowers.