Meet Kate, founder of Club 15Kate went on her first safari in Africa at the age of seven and learned all about animals, conservation, and poaching. After seeing the dangers that these animals face, she decided to do something about it. She co-authored a book with Michelle from Wild Wonderful World and has been on a journey to advocate for these wonderful animals ever since.
Kate recently partnered with Microsoft on their Project 15 initiative and launched an extension of it called Club 15. These projects are dedicated to using IOT (Internet of things) to provide technological resources to aid in the fight for conservation and anti-poaching. Think intelligent cameras and drones to detect poachers, tracking devices for keeping up with endagered species, or security detection devices for wildlife sanctuaries. Sarah Maston at Microsoft tells this story best:
"Kate became aware of Project 15 from Microsoft and reached out to me on Instagram. She had an idea, and it was a good one. Should you meet her, you will hear the urgency in her voice. She will tell you that we are out of time. She will stress to you that there will be no elephants by the time she is out of college at the rate they are disappearing. She will inspire you to act.
Kate said, “What if I could break the timeline? What if I could build an army of kids that can learn to use tools like the Project 15 Open Platform and fight for the planet?”" - Sarah Maston
Kate approached us last month to help kick off the Club 15 video series, which would be 15 minute long interviews with animal conservationists and experts. We love the mission she's taken on, and just a brief search of some of the names of the interviewees got us really excited. We setup remote interviews with her special guest from all over the world and edited the segments to be engaging to an audience of kids and teenagers. Now, anyone who has done remote video conferencing (pretty much everyone since 2020) knows how frustrating and unreliable remote video connections often can be. We wanted to make sure that her videos were quality and easy to watch. We used one of our favorite podcasting platforms, that also does HD video to pull this project off. With guests on the other side of the globe, without high-speed internet, the benefit with using that over Zoom is that while they can see each other's "normal" (read: blurry, choppy, and slow), while also recording a local high-definition version that we could retrieve at the end of the session.
Up to this point, Kate has launched eleven of the episodes with more potentially on the way! We're excited to see where Kate's Club 15 project goes!
Check out her project at www.KidsCanSaveAnimals.com and be sure to help her spread the word!
Here's one of our favorite episodes from the series, "Drones Can Save Lives"
