I was made in America and now I'm a part of making America. These are the things that I needed to be successful. If you don't utilize this time to learn something or do something different, then you're failing yourself. Take these techniques and apply them to your business. I get teary. I hate talking about it. Because I really want the little girls to know that they can do it and they can be just like me.  Thank you. Can you follow me? What would you tell someone at that very beginning stage? Being an entrepreneur is being able to take nose and build with them like bricks. America has always been associated with making it. But is this opportunity accessible to all? I'm Scott Shigeoka. Go Daddy's Entrepreneur Residence and I'm on a journey across the country meeting the people who are building it. They're defying the odds and their stories show us what it means to be made in America. So I became an entrepreneur because I saw the way I wanted to shape this world. But the journey wasn't always easy and didn't always go according to plan. But part of being an entrepreneur is pushing through that and learning from it. Our goal with this series is to highlight the everyday entrepreneurs that are making our communities better with their dedication and with their dreams, despite the challenges they face. We're telling their unique stories because if we celebrate our joy and if we also acknowledge our struggles we can lean in to the journey of being an entrepreneur. And that's why we're out here in Atlanta. Atlanta is a place where entrepreneurship thrives. It's a place where people make their own way. Growing up in Atlanta was incredible. Our mayor was black, our leadership was black. I knew black doctors, lawyers, accountants, small business owners. If there was a field of practice to esteem to, there was representation of that here in Atlanta. Here in Atlanta it seems like the soil is rich here as far as being creative and being able to have a platform to actually grow it. Atlanta is the mecca for rising businesses and it's just... Atlanta is everything. You need to be here. What are you waiting for? But it also has another side to it, like most places around the country. There is a huge income gap and a lot of it is divided along racial lines. We're not just seeing the haves and have nots, we're seeing the haves and have never's. It's literally this heartening Atlanta politically was built to include everyone but so many people are still being left behind. We're having some very, very tough conversations about society and about people. We have an opportunity to get it right. Small business ownership is second only to home ownership as a source of building wealth in this country. So we have a tremendous opportunity to unlock societal potential at an accelerated pace. Here in Atlanta we're working with G-Men, the Georgia Micro Enterprise Network and they are a partner of Empower by GoDaddy. They provide support, training, resources, tools and community for everyday entrepreneurs here in Atlanta and across the state. Hi! Hi, I'm Scott. Hi, I'm Sonia. Welcome to Atlanta. They are truly trying to close the income gap and other forms of racial inequity through the power of entrepreneurship. This is where the magic happens. G-Men in a Whole is an organization that provides the stability and the resources to those that may not have that opportunity. We help to mold and make entrepreneurs from the conception and to implementation. Sonia's going to take me around Atlanta and she's going to show me the small businesses that make Atlanta what it is.  I can smell it. I'm like, hmm, I want some of this. What people usually get. You know, the barbecue chicken. When people come together to build business and to create jobs, man, that feels good. Fallen off the bone. I'm from El Salvador. I grew up in markets selling fruits and vegetables with my grandma. I moved to the States to be independent and create my own business. I'm a kid and I never went back.  You may not know it, you may not realize it, you may not agree with it, but there is an entrepreneurial spirit and I believe that this is the greatest opportunity because we can make together what we want America to be for ourselves and for future generations. You're part of history. I could be the next Coca-Cola. We can be the next Briars Ice Cream. When you're your own entrepreneur, you can limit yourself. Of course, systems, once you start being educated on the systems, it's like, what can I do to platform myself beyond that? I love that answer. Oh, wow. Yeah, I saw her. I was just like, I love you. Going into a classroom, we're in there with businesses that we respect, that we already knew before going in. Like, you know, these businesses that we've looked up to, now we're in a room with them, makes us feel good that we're going in the right direction. When you meet people who are on the same journey, the same path, they relate to you. Some people who work nine to five, they don't understand what it means to put your whole heart into something and it has to work. I am excited about what we're going to learn today. Your entrepreneur tank should be on full when you leave. Why does this work matter to you? It matters to me because I am a third-generation entrepreneur. So, my grandfather owned a couple of restaurants around Barbecue. My father owned a restaurant. And I, at one point in time, had a catering business. So, if similar opportunity was afforded to my grandfather and my father, I really feel like they would have been more successful than they were. So that's why this work matters to me. What's up, y'all? I'm Scotcha Gioca. I'm the entrepreneur in residence with GoDaddy. I think like one of the things I hear so much is that this feels lonely sometimes, you know? Like, it can feel difficult sometimes, right? Like, people telling you, no. But I think you are here today because you're trying to defy that. You're trying to say, no, you know what? You can say that, but I'm going to tell you something else and I'm going to show you something else. I can actually do this. And you got each other is the other thing, right? You have a community here. That's what I'm feeling in Atlanta, you know? Like, how do we rise up together, right? So, rise up, right? We try to rise up. Like, you try to rise up. Like, there's some amazing trainers here that are going to help you share yourself as authentic beings in this world. And I hope you get what you need from that. One of the things we've noted here at G-Men, we've been around for about 20 years. And one of the first thing we noted that here in the South, we don't have as many of the opportunities that other cities do have. You're from Atlanta. I am from Atlanta, Georgia. I went to a school called Harper High School and it's really in the hood. And I'm the first entrepreneur in my family. I bootstrapped my way through. I was in corporate America, but I took my 401k and I just made it work. Now I go back to Harper. I go back to Adamsville and I speak to the little brown girls there. And I show them that just because you're from Adamsville, just because you're from the South side, look at me. Because I really want the little girls to know that they can do it and they can be just like me. So engagement is huge. When you engage with them and you have that conversation and they realize that you're a human and not a computer, thank you. Can you follow me? Okay? So with that being said, pull out your phones at GoDaddy. All right? So the energy in here is amazing. Everyone was so engaged in class. I never saw so many hands up in a workshop before. It was so amazing to see them hungry to learn and to want to engage. And I think that's what's required as an entrepreneur. You need to be a lifelong learner. You need to have that growth mindset that allows you to continue to level up. I want to know a little bit about like what's the dream for you? Like what's next for you? Like where are you? Where are you trying to take this journey? Let's legitimize this the way that we need to and like make a commitment to ourselves and to our children that we're going to seek the education that we need to grow our business into something more. You know, I'm excited about having other people like me to own these franchises. So I'm excited to grow my business. I'm well on my way right now so I already have that traction. I think you're always trying to be better and do more. Because it'll create stability for me in the long term. The time you all came, it felt like the last happy day. It was like that was the cutoff of businesses growing and people connecting and then the next day it all stopped. Like everything shut down. There was a 24 hour quarantine that went into a fashion midnight. Yeah, I mean we were literally in flight. You know, we were opening up, expanding another space and of course everything is at a standstill. Of all the entrepreneurs that came through the program that we work with, 90% of them are shut down. How are you guys doing this? My partner got tested positive for COVID-19. Oh wow. He is doing good though. He's recovered. He hasn't had a fever in a while. Oh great. We're just completely isolated just really trying to do our part. I think like you, you're feeling a sense of uncertainty and I think that's definitely in the air. We're trying to think of strategies to make sure that we're staying grounded and we're asking for the help we need and we're also reaching out to others how we can. You know it really has forced us to be creative. We're doing catering for frontline workers at hospitals. We did 120 people today. We've transitioned to selling a lot of to-go food. Small businesses are generally very resilient and resourceful because they've had to make things happen with very little. That's resilience. That's great. So entrepreneurship is crucially crucially important. You know if we want to get Americans back to work, small businesses need to be ready. They need to be healthy so they can employ them. All I could say is the timing of everything has just been so amazing. For GoDaddy to be a partner with G-Men and with the Atlanta entrepreneurs has kind of made the difference. That is pretty much the thing that everybody is asking for. They all need to know how to do promotions. They all need to know how to take their business from a site to online. That is an immediate solution that's available. If you don't utilize this time to learn something or do something different and you've been complaining about it, then you're failing yourself. They're actually reaching out without having to leave their home, which is important for them to know, I can do that. I can still do business from right where I am. I love that. What you're talking about is a mindset shift, right? I'm using this opportunity wisely. I love that reframe of saying this is a moment for us to better our businesses, to adapt. So next we're going to learn more about some of these entrepreneurs. Get to know who they are, how they got to where they are and see where they're going next. I was made in America and I wouldn't trade that for anything. The good, the bad, the ugly, like all of it, right? It inspires us to evolve from made to making, right? Like I was made in America and now I'm a part of making America. Our children had the vision first. All right team, ready to deliver, y'all ready? Started out challenging our children to come up with something creative for the summer. They said, can we start a business? I said, well, what do you want to sell? I said, well, can we sell the popsicles we're already making for the family? And they sold 85 popsicles in 45 minutes at their first event. Thursdays is our delivery day. We deliver in the city of Atlanta in Decatur. Pull the stick from the bottom before it falls off. All right, thank you. Thank you guys so much. We just dance and over zoom, you know, we're just doing our thing, you know. Hey Scott, how are you? I'm good. It's been a minute, right? But I'm glad we can connect even in this like COVID-19 reality. My name is Amber Con Robinson. I am Keyway Lubna Robinson. Monkey Pops. That is my children's all natural vegan popsicle business. And tell me about your kids. What are they like? And when did they get started with Monkey Pops? Lord Jahan, she's our media ninja. She's the one that takes charge of putting out e-blasts and saying, this person has 1.2 million followers and getting people attracted to Monkey Pops. I post, I update our pop-ups. I answer people's questions and I just reach out to our followers. Oh, that was you that I was talking to or something like the whole time. So they have no idea that they're talking to a 12-year-old? No. Secret. Hadar, since he was young, he was always good with numbers. He is our financial genius. He's the one that looks at the books and thinks about like, you know, are we spending too much on some products to make our popsicles the price point they are, which is pretty exciting. My sister here is a big spinger and I just say a lot. I like getting a lot of things. And then Aya, she is our special gem because she was the one that really initiated the flavors. She would basically throw ideas out and we would say, let's try to create what she's doing. We have 34 different flavors in all. Basil lemonade and strawberry lemonade and yeah, mango cream. What is it like to run a business with your kids? Because I think that's something that not a lot of folks have experience doing. What's the experience like and also what's hard about it, you know, like let's keep it real. Oh, keeping it real? When you're in the building process, which we are in, we're doing, we're touching everything and we're doing everything. So sometimes we end up burning the candle above ends to make things work. We have to get up early in the morning before the children can do some prepping. Then we got to have free time with them so they can enjoy themselves as children. It can become challenging because we know we don't want to burn them out. We want them to be excited about the business and feel that they're not missing out. The thing is that all my children start to really appreciate the sacrifice and the benefit that comes from that sacrifice. They feel good when they walk into a room and people already know them for good things. Not just for being children in the room but like, hey, you guys are business owners. We're looking forward to work with you. Their eyes light up and that does something for Amber and I both. It really does. When it comes to equity, especially racial equity in this country, being able to teach young children of color about money really early on, we'll start to heal some of the generational wealth gaps that we have. Being able to understand why wealth doesn't transfer between generations in certain communities. Historically, a lot of African-American families don't know much about financing and credit and so forth. When I graduated college, I realized that my credit was messed up. I remember turning to my mom and like, why don't y'all tell me about credit and blah blah blah. She's like, well, what do you mean? We didn't know about that. And then when we go and attempt to get financing and billing like maybe a scarlet letter on our head, you know, of this history that keeps coming forward and haunting us. Credit represents the passport to the American financial system. If one does not have a credit score, every single service we want to access becomes more expensive. There was over 130 billion dollars in 2019 invested in the form of angel and venture capital in about 11,000 U.S. firms. Less than 1% of those were black founders. We have not gotten any outside support whatsoever and we haven't been able to adequately pay ourselves just by turning the money over and putting into the business over and over. With it being full-time for my husband and full-time for me, you know, we have things that come up that pull from the financial pot. We had to get a new van for the family. That took away from what we had saved for packaging to go into our larger retailer. That gets frustrating, like very frustrating. When is that financial break going to come, you know, for us? Like that, I have moments where like, I get overwhelmed. I feel like that. So, yeah. What's coming up for you right now?  Like all of this is an enjoyable process, you know, but we've been working like tirelessly for the past five years. I want to know that there's some relief that's in the near future. And I've been coaching myself silently by looking at great entrepreneurial women. And I'm like, well, what is it that they have that allows them to be where they are? And a lot of it means that they have help, you know, addition to their spouses. Thank you for calling out that the successful people in life that we see have so much help and so much support around them. I think there's this interesting narrative that says like, you have to be everything. You have to be the really great mom. You have to be the really great business person and you have to do it all and not take time for yourself ever, you know. But it shouldn't be that way. The radical act of self-care is actually really valuable and important for your relationships and for your work. I come from an entrepreneurial family and there have been traits of entrepreneurship in my children that initially I wasn't aware of. Who is that? This is my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was the first African American civil rights lawyer in Cleveland, Ohio. Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and all of them, those were my grandfather's comrades. When I look at these pictures, I just feel like we have a lot of support, you know. That's the friend who stayed at their house when the house got destroyed in Hurricane Irma. The power goes off and we all congregate as a family in my children's room and we all huddle and like say this prayer together. We're like, oh God, please keep us safe in the process. We get all of our popsicles and we start driving through the neighborhood and giving them out to neighbors. We get a phone call from the next door neighbor and he says the storm got y'all. Three trees fell on our house. It was very scary to leave your house and come back and see it in shambles. Essentially, we were instantaneously homeless right where we prayed as a family. The tree came literally down on her bed like 20 minutes after we said a prayer. The pops saved our life. When Hurricane Irma hit, it let us know that you gotta seize the moment. The moment can come and go quickly. We lost a lot of things. Our house was destroyed. The only thing you could go really when that situation happened was up. You know, sometimes things that appear tragic aren't tragic.  We were living in the suburbs of Atlanta in Stone Mountain. We then relocated to Atlanta. Us moving to the city of Atlanta really gave us the opportunity to be more engaged in events in the city. We started developing reputation very quickly. Atlanta is such a diverse and inclusive city. One thing that I've appreciated about being here in Atlanta is that if you can navigate networks and build personal relationships, you can create opportunities. I tell them all the time like, what if the storm didn't happen? We wouldn't be where we are right now. When COVID hit, 100% of our events were just canceled. Like everything was just wiped off the board. We thought that we were going to get certain funding so that we can upgrade our equipment and get new supplies. And then with the COVID happening, it all literally disappeared in thin air. How do we shift? How do we pivot? If our product is primarily a person-to-person product, how can this product now become an online product? Hey, Amber and Kiwi, it's been so long since we last saw each other. So how has business been post COVID? We decided to offer porch deliveries. And so our customers order online. So I think it'd be a great idea if we got your Instagram account linked to your website so those static pictures turn into the live feed.  Thank you, Courtney. You can go to any social media platform, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, at Mokipops. That's it. M-O-K-I-P-O-P-S. And yeah, subscribe below. Welcome to Mokipops production world for now. So, you know, you heard me say for now. No Willy Wonka here. No, it's not. It's a Robinson's. So you've been traditionally selling Mokipops at events all around Atlanta. And now you've got your eyes set on, you know, getting up on shelves in different retail shops. Why are you moving in that direction? My son challenged us a couple of years ago saying, hey, it's great that we're going to events and people are starting to know us. But how can we make money while we're asleep? So this says, hey, that's retail. That's a retail question. That's wild. That is just, you know, that I have so much hope in optimism and faith in the next generation. I'm just like, are you asking those kinds of questions to you of that kind of insight at eight? I'm just like, wow, that's, that's, wow, that's beautiful. One of the key things that we have to do to get our products on the shelves is to, first of all, have something that looks presentable. Right now, our packaging is we have the wrappers and we have stickers to go on the wrappers. We're trying to blend the two, so we're trying to have branded wrappers. We're still like in a shared kitchen space, which we're kind of busting at the seams. So we can't produce much more than we can right now. We're limited into what we can do. We're about to do an event with Food Well Alliance where they bought the popsicles back in January. When COVID hit, it was like, well, we have popsicles sitting on the table. We still want to honor, you know, the order. So there's going to be a day in an event where they're going to have like, you know, social distancing and different COVID measures in effect. But we can still honor our business. I had a conversation with my son the other day and I was letting him know that when you're doing business with people, you want to always have integrity.  We just passed them to someone else. No, we're still able to honor that. And that's really special for us because the only way our business is really going to grow and be the places going to be if people respect us. People know that we're trustworthy and that we have a lot of integrity. What's your hopes for your kids to get out of this journey? For us, it's like legacy building, especially us being African-American on business. It's very important to be able to have a business that could be started by our children and with the help of us. That one day they can take it and just keep passing it on down the track to have that story and have that legacy and to transfer it down, you know, generations to come. That would just be awesome, you know, really. Generational wealth is the wealth passed down through families. You know, it's a big reason for the racial wealth gap today in black and brown communities because there's not a whole lot of that. A black family that owns a business is 12 times wealthier than a black family that does not. We need to accelerate everything we do to support equity and inclusion so that folks that have the determination and the resolve to get ahead can get the resources. Hopefully, when they're my age one day, they're reaping a whole different type of benefit from the job and they're being able to just help people. We want to open up the gate to people, become successful and us being able to share our tools and how we did it so we can share it all for generations to come. And a lot of ways like I'm getting chills because I'm thinking about breaking the cycle and like bringing in education and also the systems that hold us back. But really, second chances are so necessary, right? If I want to start my own business, what would you say that I should do? You shouldn't like start a lemonade business because that's a typical business that everybody wants to start when they first start it. So like something different and you need help, you can't just do it on your own then it's not going to be a complete business. You just have to learn to map yourself and push yourself beyond your limits and you can't be complacent.  It's like, look, I want to see this through for the sake of my family. Like my mother said to me, I'm just really proud of you for sticking to this, you know, and you're seeing the fruits of your labor. You know, so that meant a lot to me to hear her say that. I'm just so proud and excited for them. I think they are really doing the work behind the scenes. They're making some really big and challenging shifts in their business towards retail and new ways to sell their product. Like that is what a true entrepreneur looks like. That's a Robinson family. Y'all are showing what it means to be made in America. Like that's what it's about. This is my favorite place. This is where I get all my products and this is what I make my lettuce toner called Let Us Face It. Yolanda is a type of person that you immediately gravitate towards. She is the owner of Iwi Fresh in Atlanta, which is a farm to skin spa and she's got her own products. And then I use my herbs for my herbal mixed toner. So, you know, my grandmother, she was a home remedy queen, we called her. She had a little bitty house and the streets wasn't even like paved, but she had a little backyard and she would literally take seeds.  So this is my garden. This is my secret garden. Yolanda! Hey! Tell me more about how you started Iwi Fresh. You know, I realized as I got older that things were very processed chemical base and my son had eczema at the time. So I'm going to have to create some grandma recipes. I went back and became an esthetician. I took some herbal classes, some nutritional classes and started testing on all my friends and my family members. And I came up with Iwi Fresh, which stands for it is what it is. If it's carous, it's carous, if it's squash, it's squash, it is what it is. I was a single mother with three children. Before Iwi Fresh, you know, I was corporate America.  I was always having to prove that I was smart, that I knew my stuff. I knew there was more to me than four walls. We got charcoal, turmeric, rice, oatmeal. My bank account did not say it was time to go. My bills did not tell me it was time to go. But spiritually and emotionally, I knew it was time. I turned in my two weeks notice. It was times where it was hard for me to pay my mortgage. Car got repossessed. I had to learn how to reach as people to help me. And some people couldn't do it, some people could. It's about showing the mutuality, the interdependence. We're like a community, all the entrepreneurs. We're small business owners and we all support each other. Y'all come on out today. We'll be here till five o'clock. Just come on by Iwi Fresh. We got many petty kids, facial kids and hot chef kids. Only $25. We applied for a lot of grants and loans that are now kind of starting to come through. So that's been very helpful. What I've learned through this is that I really need to put more energy in my online sales, my online products. Even when the doors open, I got to have that. I want to know about the new space that you got going on. Is it still in progress or are you opening up? So yeah, so my concerns were always about me being in the middle of starting something. Because I already have a store that's already existing. So we were like, okay, we got to rebound from that. So I'm thinking through that. But then you have this new store that hasn't even opened yet. And it's like, whoa, how is this going to be? The new pharma oasis, Iwi. Yay, look at that. So here I am on this beautiful Saturday morning. Right here, you can see. There's a lot of work. There's still construction going on. How long have you been thinking about opening up this location? I always wanted to open up a healing space in the community. That's been my passion. You know, here in Atlanta, people have to drive far to get these healing and this wellness. When I say the word community, I'm talking about the inner city black community. This is where I grew up. And there's no accessibility to healing and wellness on the level that I want to present it with Iwi Fresh.  To go across the street and do meditation. You know, I want to be able to have that accessible for my people, for black people. In Atlanta, there's been a huge economic disparity between the poorest and the wealthiest. One of the things that Atlanta has that it's very inspiring is that their level of servant engagement by business leaders in Atlanta to get involved in solving issues is very powerful and it's what drives the community. Last year, I found this old church schoolhouse right in the community. It was just a perfect space and so then I just started working towards it. You guys want this? You gonna eat that? We're still going through inspections right now. It's a pandemic so it's going to be a slower pace. We got to get time to move in. We got to paint. Are we going to open? When are we going to open? And if we do open, what are some of the safety practices we need to do to open? So one of the things that COVID-19 has highlighted is just how important it is to not have underlying health conditions. People of color led companies who are bringing healthy solutions, whether it's wellness products or food to communities. It's supporting communities in that journey towards health. Why is wellness and spas as a business, why are they thriving right now? We are in a pandemic and I feel like health is on everyone's minds and I think we're not taking our health and our wellness in particular for granted.  So today I'm here to see Dr. K to get my vitamin C infusion. And nothing new popping up, no any concerns. No, everything seems to be really good. Okay, very good. During this journey of me opening up my healing center, I was diagnosed with cancer. One day I got this sharp pain on my left side, I didn't know what it was for. Went to the hospital and the doctor says we're going to have to do emergency surgery on you. I was blown away from it. I was like really not expecting it. I really was not expecting that. And I was like, I was like, I have to do chemo? She was like, yeah. And what kept me going was my staff. I have to be there for them because I think about their families. I got up and I'm like, okay, we're going to get through this. We're going to make this happen. Yeah, so today she's getting her nutrient cocktail. And I made a choice and pivoted to more holistic and all natural. And it's been working for me. I feel good. We are in my neighborhood where I grew up. I went to a school called Harper High School. A lot of people when you say you went to Harper, people are like, you went to Harper? And I'm like, yes.  It's really in the hood and it's real. There's a lot of craziness that goes on in Adamsville and at Harper High School. This is my room, the first window right there next to the door. That was my bedroom right there. People see you and they have these stereotypes or these expectations about what's going on in your life. But we never really know what someone's story is. We never really know what the story is. And I want to break that stereotype. The first base was right here. We played kickball on the street. I mean, literally we was kickballing the ball up here. And then you had to tag this mailbox because this was first base. I'm very passionate about speaking to young black girls and really showing them another way. I'm the first entrepreneur in my family. I bootstrapped my way through. I was in corporate America but I took my 401k and I just made it work. My family were like, wow, you made it. You graduated from college. You got a degree. Now you're good. You're successful. You made it. And I'm like, no, I haven't. I really have to really pursue what I really am. Today my business, even fresh, Farm to Skin Spa is reopening. It's been, what, three months. Woo, wow. I'm excited about opening. When I decided to open up, I had made sure that it was not my decision only. And that I had to get my staff involved because I really care about them. One of the things that I love about being a small business owner, an entrepreneur, is that I get to employ a lot of different people. Y'all ready to get into a huddle? That I can employ my own children and then I can employ other people in the community. That really warms my heart. I think my first check was about $20. And I was like, I was so happy. I got my first bank account. Yeah, Amy taught me a lot. It's cool that she got the idea for my great-grandma. They like to have her, you know, really start my mom's vision. Congratulations on reopening. Open. I can see the background. What's going on? Okay, well, I'm going to give you a tour, okay? This is our Farm to Skin chop board. This is our massage oils. That's our brown sugar scrub here. And you have different toppings. You notice we have social distance away because normally somebody is sitting right here. We're doing a waterless pedicure and manicure, which is more sanitized. My clients came in and they were like, we were excited about coming. We knew that you guys were going to be safe. What do you think about the waterless? I think it's great. I think it's a great idea. So she thinks it's a great idea. I love it. I love that you're engaging with the customers. And that's the waterless too. I know you got tons of stuff you got to do. Good luck on your opening day. Thank you, Scott. Hope you get some points soon. I don't got dishwashers, like all those fancy people. I was born and raised, so washed by hands. All right. Got a cool package from Ewe Fresh. I like that the first thing I see is Ewe Fresh branding. So this is a 14 karat glow face cream, which I've heard a ton about. This is charcoal bentonite clay and turmeric. Dang, that's cool. So squash it out. Face cleanser. Lots of stuff in my face. What you trying to say, Yolanda? That smells good. Is that lettuce? Yeah, it is lettuce. Okay, Yolanda. So tell Scott I'm twirling for you. Hey, Yolanda. How are you? Good to see you again. Oh, yes. Hi. I met you in the class. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm excited to work on improving your site. Tell me, what are your goals for your website? Our pivot was to really sell more. So we really wanted our website to be more e-commerce driven so that we can sell more products. And I think our products have been behind and they need to be on the front. There's a few ways we can do that without being super aggressive or in their face. We can work with you to find that balance. That'd be great. You know, as I'm in the middle of this right now, you know, with my existing store and with the new store coming up and then with this new wave of COVID, what advice could you, you know, give me as a business owner? So especially during this time when people are looking for wellness, I would say like lean into that, you know? Show them that you have something that they care about. I like that. Also, don't lose sight of who you are.  We're buying into the love and the spirit that you have. The new space is really coming along really good. Come on, come on. Give me some dance moves. Y'all on camera. Come on. So what's your timeline on all of this? Everything continues to go the way it's going. August 1st will be our soft opening. It's going to be membership based. Very cool. So it's coming up and just around the corner. Yes. Real quick, like really around the corner. Being an entrepreneur is so difficult for a lot of different reasons. And that takes immense grit. And that's exactly what Yolana has been doing for years. We are seeing her open and expand into new stores even in the midst of a pandemic. Oh, look at this. This really gives me chills to see my vision come to life because this is what I want people to feel when they come in. She has to get the permitting, also the decorating, getting furniture in, hiring people, getting them into the space. There's a lot that needs to get done. That's a pretty tight turnaround. To me, her journey and her story is about what can happen if you continue to persevere. I feel excited to see what happens in this coming month. I'm excited to see the new space. I'm excited to see how her vision comes to life. I think gone are the days of like the shark mentality and entrepreneurship. In fact, entrepreneurship and small businesses can be seen as a community effort. It can be seen as a collaborative effort where we work to support each other. I think that's what the pandemic is showing us, that we are so much stronger when we have a community that we can grow alongside of. And that's what I've seen in Atlanta. Atlanta is a city of opportunity, but it's also a city of economic and racial disparity. And it takes a community effort to bridge that divide. It takes working together and looking forward. And both Yolanda and the Robinsons are in this moment of growth. They're both pushing their plans forward despite all of the obstacles and enlisting their community to help them succeed. You know, so much of what it means to be an entrepreneur is to see the fear, to acknowledge it, and then to be courageous and walk through it. I'm so excited. It's such an exciting moment. Today we are finally opening the Oasis. Yes. You've worked so hard and you have hustled to get to this point. I have to pat myself on my back because I did good, Yolanda. Yes, Yolanda. And how are you feeling about your website? Oh, I like it. It looks so fresh and so clean clean. I like how the flowers look alive. That's actually a real flower. I love that because it is what it is and it's alive. And you know, with our fruits and vegetables popping out, I can see. I love it. I love the nature. So people can connect the dots, you know, to see that farm to skin. It looks like it's easy to navigate and that's very important. And that was our main point was easy to navigate user-friendly. So it has definitely solved that for sure.  This is a moment where you are just transcending. Like, that's the word I would use. What I've learned in this journey is that what you put out in the universe is really what you get back.  What would you tell yourself? Quit. Turn your resignation in early. I waited too long. I remember our conversation where she was getting emotional and talking about how there are young girls in the area of Atlanta that she is running her business in and she wants them to know that this is possible. Like, this can be a future for you. You know, it's important for me to facilitate this opportunity for other people in my community because it's not about me. It's bigger than me. It's bigger than me. It's for all of us. Atlanta is at a crossroads right now. There's a reason Atlanta is home to over 25 Fortune 100 companies. This is where I will caution. Because of our accelerated growth in technology and in innovation, we're now moving into a new era where a lot of people, particularly minorities, are not being included. Where you have innovation density, you have increased poverty. And it's because if you don't bring along the poorest of those which in Atlanta disproportionately are Black, then those people become left out. And so if they're not exposed to opportunities or realities, they won't pursue them. How do you create something where the next generation looks to it and says, I see myself in that? Today we are going into one of our first stores. Very excited about it. Very charged. We're just ready to get it in there. During these times of COVID, it's been hard to store to keep stock or get new things in. So for us to be our first new store and they want us, it's very humbling. And we'll be on some shelves very soon. Do you all feel like this is a major accomplishment? Yes. Yes, good. So this is just store number one of many. Our goal is to go big, real big. Our goal is to be all across America where Mokipops is a household name. Big box stores. And so this is just the beginning. Our hard work that we've been doing is paying off. And we now are starting to see and feel the fruits of our labor. Yes. You know, it was a little uncertain in the beginning of the pandemic. You know, but we were like, look, we still can do it. You know, people are still buying food. People are still buying treats. We're like, we fit into this and we're going to ride it with it right now. So I love your teamwork. I love how you guys are so supportive of each other, the vision, coming in through the training, the gym and taking what you needed, all the nuggets and the strength that you guys have already. That's what people need to see. This is how it's done. This is supposed to be my teacher, y'all. You made the class so fun.  Yes, ma'am. And you gave it to us. Yes, ma'am. And we learned something. Yes. So thank you for coming out today. You're welcome. Come on in here. This is the rainforest area. We have yoga, reiki, yonestine, reflexology, body scrub, all of that's happening on the first floor. Then on the third floor, we're doing mental health behavior. And then we have our manufacturer up there. So each sub-leaser gets to come in and decorate it and do what they want to do to it. So this is it. This is it. Go daddy did a website for us. We saw it yesterday for the first time. Can I see that? I'm excited on just starting a fresh, clean slate. And it's all part of your launch. Yes. Your new beginning. I'm excited. I saw when you guys first came through. And you know you have this vision of what you want to do and you feel like you're there. And then you have this aha moment of, wow, I couldn't have been doing so much more.  Right.  And you really, you know, it's like, whoa. Right.  Right. And I'm like, okay, we're going to get through this. I don't know how, I don't know when, but we're going to get through it. Right. Right, we did. Right. The internet has really managed to circumvent some barriers to entry, including first and foremost capital. In many cases, small businesses no longer need as high amounts of capital to create a business environment. It's just easier for the customers and us instead of having to say everything by word of mouth, they can just research us and be able to read our story and be able to access our deliveries. And it just has to be interesting. A lot of colors, a lot of nice, pretty fonts. Update always. Until I met the Robinson's, I had never thought of this idea of bringing your kids along the journey of being entrepreneurs. We do know that fresh air and being outside is something that you don't have to be contagious or have to shy away from. We just got to do it in a responsible manner. So how are they making it socially distant? What's the setup like? We're curbside. The children are working the booth a couple feet from us right now. You coming to get a mokipop? Okay. These are our flavors here. The great thing is, since we're at a neighboring garden, they have kale plants set up beside our popsicles. So people can come and get a popsicle that is homegrown somewhere and they can get a plant. So making a connection is that the food that you're eating from the popsicle had to come from a garden somewhere. We did a pre-sale and they bought 600 pops from us and we wanted to make sure that we got that to them before the close of 2020. So we didn't have to carry that as a debt into 2021. I'm really impressed by the way that they're honoring their pre-COVID orders. Because if you don't have your integrity, what do you got? Saying what we do and doing it and following through with it. I love that. I feel like the pandemic came through and you all are finding ways to navigate through that and to do it in a safe way and continue selling products. Do you all feel proud of your ability to do that to make this all happen? Oh, definitely. They have this resilience. They're able to take these moments of catastrophe, a tree falling into your house. A pandemic radically changing everything about your business model. They take these really catastrophic moments and they turn it into gold. They're alchemists. The Robinson's, I think, the dynamic of them as a family, they are holistically the whole vision of what partnership, teamwork and family and community is really about. They were able to take that and push it to the next level. And you had a hand in it too. It's a big part of it. It's very heartwarming. It makes it all worth it. How did it feel to see Yolanda's new space? Did you check it out? Oh, my God. To persevere the way she has and gotten through a pandemic and still do the shift. So to come here and to see the vision unfold from all of the people that she has already beginning to have space, which means she's opened up a door and it literally blown my mind. Can we do the Iwi Fresh Park Oasis? We're excited to be here. I'm super excited that you guys are part of this movement because that's really what it is. It's a movement for us to be able to bring healing and wellness to the community. When she first got here it looked nothing like it looks today. You couldn't even see what she was talking about, but she had the vision. It's a great example that it can be done. We are at a point of history we're resetting. We're resetting society. Right now we're focusing on racial equity in black communities but we've got to deal with poverty everywhere whether it's Adamsville or Appalachia. So if you are inspired and become passionate about solving a problem in your community, in your industry, in your ecosystem, by all means, I think you should take the first step towards becoming an entrepreneur. You should be able to wake up one morning and say, you know what? I want to start a business and I'm going to start it. Thank you guys for being a part of my dream come true. Thank you very much. Thank you. For me entrepreneurship is about creating your dream or your vision of life to look like and then getting out there and making your own way. That's what she did. She is now marching towards these large industries and saying make space for me. When you're an entrepreneur you never stop fighting and that's exactly what Yolanda and the Robinson's did. They put in the work to pivot to delivery to get their products on shelves or to open up and they don't have to do it alone. This work is all about having community. We have to remember that no one created their small business by themselves. I think the reason why there's a huge movement is because it's time. For me, I have seen so much support, so much love from black people who are being very intentional on coming out and supporting my business. There's so many different forms of protest that are required to create change and I believe that entrepreneurship is a form of protest. If everyone plays their part entrepreneurialism would allow us all to experience the concept of the American dream and truly experience freedom inside of the American construct.


My name is Deanna, so under D, and Debra Duncan taught me this one, you may already know it. She's the librarian at the Pory Branch of Coquilla, and the next day after doing the stretch, I couldn't figure out why my sides were hurting. So make sure you're gentle with yourselves. I'll do it first, and then we'll do it together. So it's just basically when you need a break and the kids need to have a stretch. It works for bigger kids as well, like Robert in school. So I stretch the right. From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is 15 miles. From Wobbleton to Wibbleton is 15 miles. From Wibbleton to Wobbleton and Wobbleton to Wibbleton, Wibbleton to Wobbleton is 45 miles. That's great. Did you want to stand up? Absolutely. So we're going to go to the right. From Wibbleton to Wobbleton is 15 miles. From Wobbleton to Wibbleton is 15 miles. From Wibbleton to Wobbleton, from Wobbleton to Wibbleton, from Wibbleton to Wobbleton is 40 miles. It's 45 miles.


Dear students, you know that plasma membrane allows substances to pass through it. Plasma membrane ki iss property ko, ham membrane permeability kehte. However, plasma membrane is not permeable to every substance. The structural features of plasma membrane confer it with the property of selective permeability. Due to selective permeability ki vaja se, plasma membrane koch substances ko to aloh karte hai aur koch substances ko pass karna aloh nahi karte. Due to this property, plasma membrane regulates the movement of substances across it. This property is fundamental to the functioning of living cells and the maintenance of an intracellular physiological environment which is required for carrying out various enzymatically controlled metabolic reactions. Membrane permeability varies for various substances. Ye variation doh factors per depend karte hai ek type of the molecules aur dosri size of the molecules par. Karte ke lehaz se, ham discuss karenge ki kis type ke molecules ko plasma membrane easily aloh karte hai aur kis type ke molecules ko plasma membrane dis-aloh karte hai. So first of all, we shall discuss the lipid soluble non-polar substances. You know that plasma membrane has a continuous lipid bilayer. Due to this lipid bilayer, the lipid soluble substances can passively diffuse through the membrane easily by dissolving in the lipid molecules of bilayer. However, the rate of penetration depends on their lipid solubility and the size of these molecules. The more soluble substances will penetrate at more greater rate and similarly, smaller size substances will move comparatively rapidly. In comparison to the lipid soluble and non-polar substances, the polar substances and charged particles that is ions have difficulty in passing through because of the hydrophobic interior of the lipid bilayer that is highly impermeable to water soluble substances and charged substances. Similarly, the large size macromolecules, for example proteins, cannot pass through the membrane because of their size. However, you can understand that such non-diffusible substances are necessary for normal cell functions. So plasma membrane has evolved many structural as well as other mechanical systems which include the active and passive mechanisms and bulk transport mechanisms to allow such substances to pass through the membrane. Dear students, Membrane permeability ka concentration gradient ke saath bohot vaze taluk hai. Ab hum, concentration gradient aur membrane permeability ka mathematical relationship study karenke. The permeability of membrane means that the rate at which it penetrates the membrane passively. If a substance is diffusible and a continuous concentration gradient exists across the membrane, then the permeability of the membrane that is the amount of substance crossing through the membrane per unit time represented as delta QS over delta T is equal to the product of permeability constant of the substance and its concentration gradient present on the two sides of the membrane so that we can read this equation as delta QS over delta T is equal to P into concentration gradient C1 minus C2. This equation is applicable to simple diffusion only. Ye equation actively transport its substances aur electrolytes par applied nahi hoti. Kyunke electrolytes aqueous medium mein charred particles mein dissociate hojate hain aur charred particles simple diffusion se membrane ko cross nahi kar sakte. Dear students, The membrane permeability to a substance is not a fixed or constant entity. It can be altered. Certain substances for example hormones and neurotransmitters can alter the permeability of the membrane to certain substances. Hormones do so by reacting with the receptor sites and influencing the channel size and carrier mechanisms. For example, antidiuretic hormone can increase water permeability of renal collecting duct in mammals up to 10 times. Similarly neurotransmitters in nerve and muscle cells act on integral membrane proteins so that their permeability for ions increases.


Thanks for joining. Now we're gonna do the KDEV board report. This is something that we used to do within the AGM, but then we realized that it was a good idea that everybody who also is not part of the KDEV could join and see it, so that's why we're doing it here on the main program of Academy. For those of you who are EV members and are scared of it, there will also be a version of this in the AGM for, like, I don't know, making sure that you get all of the information. Before we get started, let's do a super short introduction of ourselves. We can do it with the first slide if you want, so you can see our names. I'm gonna start myself. My name is Aleish. I am the, oh yeah, of course. Yeah, my name is Aleish. I am from Barcelona and I am the KDEV president nowadays. Hello. Hi, I'm Adrian. I'm a roving board member, I guess, and that's all. Lydia. Hi, I'm Nate Graham. I am another roving board member. I'm from the USA. I was just elected last year and I'm happy to see all of you. And hi, I'm Lydia. I'm on the board for quite some time. I'm currently vice president and we also would have Aike here, but for personal reasons he unfortunately can't be here. So we will do this with the four of us. Yeah. Hi, Aike, if you're watching us, well, he knows everything we're gonna say anyway. So in this AGM, we, like, there's three of our roles that end this year. It's gonna be Lydia's, Aike's as well, and mine. The three of us have announced that we're running again, but if any of you wants to join and fight us in a voting battle of democracy, you can do that. It will be very interesting and fun for all of us, I'm sure. Cages will be provided if you want it to be a cage match. Right. Fledgling weapons only. Yeah, more on the practical matters of the EV this year. We have six new members. We have one new member less than last year, but a good bunch of new members less than a couple of years ago. Well, if you know somebody who is doing good KD work and think it would be good fit, remember to invite them. It's always a good idea. But for now, let's thank, oh, I wanted to say that. Well, Raju, Neil, Gompa, Justin, Felix, Natalie and Simon. Thanks for joining the KDV this year. Oh, yeah. About that one, something I wanted to mention. Also, a big thanks to Adrian who has been working on new software for managing our members. This has been a big topic in the past, and we hope that with the new work now, it's going to be amazing. Thank you. Yep. The button got pressed. Spoilers. No, the button gets stuck. Well, it's the next button. It has like two buttons. Okay. Yeah, that's good. So yeah, one of the big tasks we do besides of you, even members is having like individuals supporting members who part of what they do is donating. There's been like big changes on how donations happen. The individual supporting members are still on the previous system, and they're being migrated into new fun ways of doing their stuff. But we also started using over the recent years GitHub and more recently even Donorbox, and that's also ways that what people are starting to do is individual supporting process. Yeah. Just the one. Yes. So those were the individual being like individual people who do it for their own sake. These are organizations that participate obviously in a kind of different amount. We've had a good number of new ones for the last year, and thank you very much to the three of them being Coupon to Focus, Titan, and Ambition, but not to diminish the rest. The systems, Google, SUSE, the Kid Company, Canonical, Slimbo, and Tuxedo. All of them are KD patrons being organizations that are part of the KDV, and they take part on other spaces like the advisory board for most of them who will get there. Also, we got a new supporter, which is Anioka. Anioka, actually, it's one of the minus two. They moved from Patron to supporter. This one. The advisory board. So the advisory board is a way for organizations to have a say with KDE, not a say in KDE. They're not steering, but it's good to have that conversation in somewhat private to help those organizations understand where we are going and those organizations can say something about where they would like us to go, what their interests are. The advisory board consists of both sponsors, patrons, such as Blue Systems and Canonical, organizations that make heavy use of KDE software, the City of Munich, and other interested organizations. So these are people that we talked with with some regularity. There's advisory board calls where we can hear each other out on what is interesting. So we'd like to thank Blue Systems, Canonical, the City of Munich, Debian, Fosna, Nigeria, the Free Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation Europe, Open UK. You saw pictures of Open UK earlier today. The OSI, SUSE, the Document Foundation, the Cute Company, and Cute Group, SlimBook, Tuxedo, and our new advisory board members, Kabuto Focus, G10 Code, and Ambition. So that's the advisory board. Besides the advisory board being the place where we can talk to our supporting organizations, we also have other friends, partners, and affiliations. This is ongoing collaboration because it's technical, sometimes because we've shared an office or we just feel like doing cool stuff together. So Lix and the Cute Project and Frey and Randa meetings are our friends that do cool stuff. KDE Spain is the local organization in Catalonia and Spain, and they have an academy ES, a similar kind of event as to what we're having here. We're partners with GNOME, of course, to organize the Linux application summit. That's once a year, get together to talk about applications going out there. The Chaos, we are part of the application ecosystem working group, Neofotosis are one of our friends there, affiliated with the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Open Source Initiative, and the Open Invention Network. Those are free software promoting organizations and the Open UK that do things like patent protection, licensing, innovation. KDEV is, as an organization, also member of a number of things, the OSI, the OIN, OASIS, and the Document Foundation. That means that we have our little say in how standards are built. We have a little say in patent protection for the Linux ecosystem. That's all very useful. That's the way we're involved in the larger ecosystem around us. Let's switch to a smaller view. KDEV is no longer a purely volunteer organization. We're really happy to have a bunch of contractors and employees that help us achieve the goals of the EV. The goals of the EV are to support you, all of you, in getting cool KDEV stuff done. First and foremost, we should mention Petra, who does all the things. We will go through these in more detail briefly, but I'd also like to mention Joseph, Annika, Paul, Adam, Dina, Diago, Ingo, Natalie, and Nicholas. Now we'll tell you all about them in the next slide. All right. So, Petra, I'm sure many of you have come across. She's incredible support for the board, maintaining our office, making sure that you get your reimbursements, that our paperwork is in order, all these things. Really important for KDEV to run. Similarly, Dina, you might have come across her. Amazing help in making sure this academy runs together with the local team and the rest of the academy team, as well as the Linux app summit. We couldn't do this without her support. Then we have Adam, who is supporting everything around the goals, making sure that the gold champions have what they need, that they can meet every now and then and discuss. And the same thing for the academy team, supporting meetings and so on. If you, at some point, need project coordination support, let me know and we can figure it out. Which brings us to Lana and Joseph, who have joined us for the KDEco program. They have done amazing work in making sure that KDE is taking part in the Plower Angel project, that all the paperwork gets done, that all the community outreach gets done, that we get the eco certificate and so on. The funding for doubt has by now ended and we're looking for new funding. Lana, unfortunately, left us due to the end of the project, but we hope to work with her again in the future. And Joseph has been focusing more on community topics, which he will talk about in a talk later today or tomorrow, I'm not sure. You should try it. I think we skipped one. Yes, we did. Yes. All right. Next up on our list of contractors, we have Paul and Anika, our marketing team. Paul and Anika have been, they're sitting right over there. Paul and Anika have been responsible for helping to improve KDE's presence around the world, make sure everybody knows about us. This year has been quite a busy year. They have been doing a lot of work around the fundraisers and communications regarding that. The KDE network is a topic that has seen a lot of work as well to make sure that people are organized around the world. They have also helped a lot creating content for external events and helping to promote those. They've been updating KDE's presence in social media and making sure that people who are still using proprietary networks and have not yet made the jump over to free alternatives know about us and are able to hear about KDE news and they've also helped to create the four kids and four activists and four all sorts of other people pages that you can find on kde.org slash four. These are really cool pages. And finally, they also help out with release notes and release announcements for our big releases, especially plasma and KDE gear. So a lot of work. And next up, we have our newest contractor, Natalie, who is our hardware integrator. She has started just very recently. She's been working to improve the user experience in plasma on devices like the types that are shipped by many of our partners. We have a lot of partners and supporters these days who actually sell hardware, which is a really exciting topic and something that's very near and dear to my heart. It's something that I like to see. And so Natalie is helping to make sure that this hardware works better with our software. She started with power devil and general power management topics, which are always very important, especially for devices with batteries. This also is a part of the KDE eco initiative. So there's some cross pollination going on there. And we're going to be seeing a lot more from Natalie soon. Ingo, we did announce last year that he was the first of the make a living positions we created, including Natalie and then Nico that we're going to talk about later. And well, Diego, I think that we also put in that bucket at some point. Ingo, he has been working on bringing or making it easier for all of you to achieve your applications in different platforms. There's been good progress on Windows Store and Android so far. We're starting to see how to finalize that. We're going to have a puff, right, Ingo? Over the week, actually, yeah. Right, Ingo, because it's on the slides. Well, be there if you have an application that you want to see shipped and reach out to Ingo if there's something that you think that could be done at, like, a KDE level to have you do that. But it's very important for us that your applications get out there and hopefully, like, help fundraise somehow and become part of this healthy cycle of or have your users are making KDE bigger, right? And Nicolas, he started, say hi, started this year around February and we've been working. So the idea for this position is to be working on the different aspects of our software that are shared and that help all of you to, like, work and create your KDE software. At the moment, this has mostly meant to help with the port and everything to the sixes, the good six and primary six, plasma six and everything in the six now. So that's what we've been doing so far. Yeah, 666. That's what we've been doing so far. We'll see what the future is gonna bring us on. And the last of our make a living contractors is Tiago. Tiago picked up the long running documentation improvement project. We spent some time a long time ago examining what does our documentation need to be really world class. Tiago has been picking up individual topics each that last a month or two to improve. So he's improved the Kirigami documentation, has been annoyed at Kconfig, haven't we all? So he's he's available for writing and general documentation review. Feel free to reach out to him if you have documentation needs. That's it for the contractors. And we will move on to events because KDEv supports contractors pays for contractors to improve the KDE software but also helps with events because events are great because it means you can actually look people in the eye and make funny gestures at them. Yell at them in person to fix your bugs. Yeah. Yeah, see, where else would you weigh? Yeah, where else would you get Kevin to stick out his tongue at you? So we're really glad to have all of you here at Academy Academies, our yearly, our biggest, our farthest flung event. Big thank you to the sponsors who may make this happen. One of the topics each year at Academy is where's the next one going to be. So if you feel the urge to organize it in our name, then then do so. Anywhere else in the world, given the temperatures here right now, I think we want the next one to be in Norway in November. But that's up to you. Feel free to organize a new one. We don't just do the big events. We also do, next slide please, sprints. Sprints are far more focused small or events that pick one special software topic or organizational topic. You see that we have EV board sprints. That means that we get together, either in real life or online and spend a weekend working on administration. There's been a KDE plasma sprint, there's PIM, which traditionally tries out the cake in Toulouse. There's the KDE eco sprint. We've had a bun, we've had a handful of sprints, but not nearly as much as we'd really like. And so I'd like to repeat the call to everyone in the KDE community, sprints are for you. And we're here to help you make those happen. So if you've got a topic, reach out to us, reach out to Adam, and we'll make it happen. Next to our own conferences and our sprints, we also of course show up in lots of other places. So for example, so far, we were at Fossum this year. KDE eco was present at LAS and the Bundestag. We went to something very new, the All American High School Film Festival to get a bit out of our bubble and talk to other people about cool stuff like KDE in life. Latino wear, the one to summit, cute world summit, cute come Brazil, mega con, another one of those things to get us out of the bubble. If you want to represent KDE at events, you should totally talk to the promo team and the board to get help for that if you need it. On the side of conferences of our own over the last year, we had the Academy last year, the Linux app summit this year, Academy ES, and of course, this Academy where you are. And to make all this happen, we need money, which fundraising gives us. There are quite a few things happening about fundraising. As we already talked about, we got new patterns with co-want to focus G10 code and ambition. Together with the fundraising working group, we refocused our donations on the platform Donor box. We ran an end of the year campaign. We ran a fundraising for KDE in life, both of which were very successful. We have started thinking about how to raise a partnership prices starting in 2025, because membership as a pattern or partnership in KDE is comparatively cheap. You can still get in before 2025. Grants have been successful in that we got the KDE ECO grant. So far, we have unfortunately not been successful in getting a follow-up grant. If anyone can help with that, has ideas, please come talk to us and talk to us. Thank you so much for your time, Joseph. Last but not least, we are thinking more about how to actually get paid apps into the proprietary app stores as a source of revenue for KDE. And of course, as the saying goes, do good things and talk about them. So we also have to tell the world about what we do as well. We published a report for 2022. Just the other day, it's a long and beautiful document with a lot of behind-the-scenes looks at what's happening in KDE and KDE. If you haven't read it yet, highly recommend it and spread it to your friends. So I already mentioned the fundraiser for KDE in life. And at the Academy, we talked about how we want to work with the KDE life team as part of this whole make a living discussion that we try to find dedicated funds for them to improve KDE in life as a kind of test balloon to see if that is something that works for KDE and the team that wants to do dedicated fundraising. The fundraising side of that has proven fairly successful. And we're quite happy with that. And we're quite happy with the effort that both the KDE in life team and the promo team but also the fundraising team have put into this to make it a success because it was quite a bit of work. Now we have the money and now we need to spend it on improvements to KDE in life, which is one of the next things that will come up. And I'm sure you will hear more about it tomorrow in their keynote. So overall, this try-around dedicated individual project funding continues, but things are looking pretty optimistic right now. So now is the time when we talk about some of our favorite things, the highlights of the year, everything that you all accomplished with our help and we accomplished with your help. There are some really great things. We talked a little bit earlier about sprints. We were very happy to see that sprints started happening again after the isolation of the COVID pandemic, which was no fun. We definitely want to see more sprints. This is something of our bread and butter, so let's see if we can do some more of those. We also concluded the Blower Engle project. The funding has run out, but it has essentially been successful. We got an app certified and we've created a lot of interest and momentum behind it. I think you saw a lot of engagement about KDE EV and the goal topic before. It now continues as a community goal, so that's really great. We also have our fundraising platform. Lydia just spoke on that a little bit, but moving to donor box has been really hugely impactful for us and getting a modernized fundraising platform gives us many good options going forward for the future. We also have cute six porting, which is going on. This is something that's been happening in the background for a while and now starting a few months ago, it's happening in the foreground. So we're really very happy for all the work that people have done on here. I want to call out Nico in particular, who has put really a lot of effort into this, and the net result is that many people in the audience here, myself included, are able to actually live on Plasma 6, get master right now. Okay, I'll shut up now. It's pretty great. And we're also, in general, seeing more interest in our hardware, among our hardware and software partners, and Lydia's reminding me that I missed something that was behind the microphone. We filled all of the make-a-living positions. This was a multi-year effort to start hiring more people and we have now done it. So we did a lot of the things we said we were going to do and it's pretty great. Next slide. So what we said we would do, number one was reassess our financial situation, we definitely wanted to move towards more sustainable funding models and we also wanted to make sure that we were spending enough of our money to keep out of legal hot water. We have now succeeded in doing that. We have also modernized our donations platform. So on the fundraising side, in general, what we set out to do has been a success. We trialed project fundraising, as Lydia mentioned a little bit ago. This has also been a success. We're going to be using this experience going forward to do some more things that's very exciting. We also wanted to make sure that our infrastructure was modernized, the move to GitLab has been proceeding, everybody is using it now and in the near future we're going to finally 100% move into that, cutting off fabricator so that is going to happen as well. The next thing is to support the new KDE goals. This is something that's been happening over the year. Speaking personally as a gold champion, I feel very well supported. I can't speak for everybody else but that's at least one out of three. We're going to try to have a cross goal sprint here, possibly the spring, summer, keep an eye out if that's something you'd be interested in attending. There's going to be more information about that soon. In general, we would like to see a little bit more community involvement involved in the goals. These are definitely community goals, as nice as it is to have gold champions with lots and lots of time to work on it. Sometimes that isn't always possible and so it's great when people take the initiative too. So that's something that we would like to see in the coming year. We also want to learn a little bit more about our changing ecosystem with regards to how software is distributed and what our position is in the greater free software world. This is something you're probably going to hear about in many other forms over the coming conference and we're going to continue to keep an eye on that. Finally, a big topic this year was to get us all back together in person. Now we can pretty much all say that the global pandemic is finally over and it is very important for us that we're all able to sit here in a conference and enjoy each other's presence. So that's pretty great and I'm happy that we've been successful in that. So our topics for next year, you will see that there's stuff that continues over the years since last year. It's not because we think that it wasn't successful but a lot of topics like span over a good amount of time. Like Nate was saying, kitty goals are working very well but we do miss people joining them. It would be interesting to understand what would be the correct dynamic for that to happen because like Nate, I was a kitty goal leader for a while and it could feel lonely at times. It's a very like social issue but I think that from the kitty view we can have that happen. Like for example through that sprint, like finding the right way to help the goals is going to be a good source for success for the goals which are in the end a success for kitty itself. The financial situation that we keep talking about, well like you know we had big injections in the past that we had to learn to manage what we've done to make a living program that has increased our spending considerably. We need to marry these two together through donations through everything and that's what we are doing and well there's no pandemic anyways but we do believe that like meeting is part of the goals for the kitty view, turning the kitty from something that is virtual and theoretical into something practical and where people get to work together is a big part of what the kitty view does and well we need to make sure that it's part of our goals. As Adrienne mentioned before it's about the conferences but it's also about the sprints of different meetings that we can have and well whichever is the right ways that we have to coordinate among ourselves in any case. On the last few years we're talking about the make a living positions about well how do we do this. We're moving into a mindset of okay we are now spending that money we need to make sure that we're delivering there. Not to put pressure into all of you working on that on there but actually it's on all of us right like we need to make sure that these positions deliver as well as like not us being contracted but us as like whoever benefits from from these positions so because all of them I think that we all agree bring important things to the to the community but well nobody can change the world on our own we need to work together. So for us making sure that the make a living positions are successful is very important because it's what is going to bring we believe the well the story of the next few years of the kitty view in general. One friend that we've also been seeing and it's not entirely unrelated to what I was just talking about is getting our products closer to our users with us getting being very distant to our end users a little bit in this theoretical virtual kind of product that maybe we've been and while that works and it's super fun well it makes us a little bit less relevant finding ways to like touch on what everybody cares about and being able to act on it is something important. Now you could think this is something more related to what the kitty community does and the different developers but well our experience or my my experience is that as a KTV we have a lot of well possibilities that to help there and if if there's ways we can do that we will continue doing so like we are already doing now like I think that you all agree. So this have been the key topics that we see for the KTV for this year. Obviously everything is discussable bit at the AGM, bit on the hallways, on the chat rooms online or we're going to have an office hour during the buff days where we can talk about whatever you want to talk about we don't really have a list of topics or anything to touch on there so feel free to join. Like I said earlier also if you're thinking about either joining the KTV or even joining the KTV board you can reach out to us and we can talk about it like you're welcome to do either of those things it's all fine and fun I think I would say it's a good thing to do. So that's what we wanted to talk about I think that we have some time for questions if any of you have them. I just have two questions so I was thinking do you think that positions for make a living at KDE could also provide some kind of reporting on their activities for the last year. A lot of us actually don't get to see much of that work and I mean I'm kind of disconnected as I would love to go and then the other one is that I don't know if you would consider finding help there too but when it comes to design integration I feel like sometimes like some of us designers just have a big bridge to cross when it comes to realizing some of the work we want to do and unless we go and finally some developers that might like what we're doing we have most of the times no chance of making a certain change happen in the system and so I just wanted to suggest that and ask that question to find some kind of UI integrator or something like that. Maybe it's easier if you do the questions one by one. On the reporting something we've told our contractors always maybe it's more relevant for the make a living but in general it's for all of them is that communicating is important and even part of the job for the make a living like you will see them like blogging or sending emails on the different mailing lists I mean that is how the kind of tools that we have available we can always do more of that well note that we also need to pay for it so that's how contracting works but I think that we're not doing terribly bad that way we will be seeing more of that there's two of them that are like not even one year in or actually none of the make a living are one year in to the position so we also need some kind of flexibility there more communication is would always be better but yeah it's an evolving topic this is something that we're pretty new to at KDEV so anything that you have to share regarding what's working and what's not working I think is very helpful the message that more communication would be desirable is a good message I think we don't want to make HR policy here at this meeting but it's definitely a helpful thing for for you to tell us and I think that we can be thinking about that going forward so thank you looks like we're getting an answer out of the audience to you turn it up I think it turned it now now so to sort of answer the end his first question on my beer behalf what I've been doing or trying to do is do like a monthly blog post of these are things I've done this month as part of being KDE software platform guy I have been slacking off a bit for the last two months which is not great and I should get back to that habit but that's at least my ideal of working and communicating and I also would like to sort of take the reverse and turn it into a question how could we or how should we establish some sort of communication channel from the community to us contractors what the community would like us to see doing so I think that that's what we've been suggesting to all of the contractors in the past is you get sponsored but you get sponsored to work within the community so in the community we have plenty of channels for us to communicate and just using these in the most efficient manner should be enough like if that's not enough we have like bigger problems right you're here everybody go talk to Niko and tell him what you want from him that's what he's saying right now in general like extrapolating a lot about for example how we how each of the contractors communicates is delicate right because the different positions will also be very specific about what they do like for example on Niko's case like there's like smaller tasks that you can be talking about but like no like super flashy things on the case of Ingo he has been seeing like bigger things and he has been blogging about the features when they get more done and I don't think that one or the other is a better approach I think that it's like on a case by case basis doing it will make more sense when we start seeing like how Natalie does that like I'm sure that they'll find the correct way and like deciding that they all should be doing this thing is also like the wrong approach on the second question from Andy was about take that one go for it okay so I think if I can paraphrase your second question it was basically can Katie even hire a designer or something like that is that is that good like purely from an artistic perspective right but I mean somebody who can like write code and integrate yeah somebody like they can order around so it's an interesting idea one thing I'll say from an HR perspective is that we don't currently have any positions open right now this is by design we wanted to fill all these positions and then reassess our financial situation what we really really don't want to do is hire a bunch of people they do a bunch of great work we run out of money and then we need to fire a bunch of people so that would be terribly undesirable right now we're in a situation where we're deliberately spending more money than we take in so that we can reduce our reserves but those reserves don't last forever and we're not trying to spend our reserves down to zero so before we can open any new positions we need to increase fundraising efforts so that our burn rate doesn't go down as much as it is right now again I would like to emphasize this is intentional and deliberate we're not the organization is not going bankrupt we were deliberately trying to spend down our reserves by hiring for these positions now having done so we need to make sure that there's a sustainable funding source so that we can keep the people who we have hired continuing to be hired so we don't have to get rid of them and also expand anything in the future I would say if you have any interest in future positions please help out on the fundraising side this is super important we now have really great tools that make fundraising easy so at the moment I think the design topic and the interface between design and code is probably going to have to remain a community topic a VDG topic at the moment I mentioned this one of the topics when we were talking about KDN life was how we're going to manage the different like the separate fund raising this was something that we never really wanted to do because but it's work and over the last year what's happening well over the last year I could work on some tooling for our well for his treasury work so at the moment we have the opportunity to do better work there so maybe if you're creative we can find things we can do together we're getting one last comment slash question it is a comment sorry continue from what Nicholas said the promo team we write a log every two weeks that is normally for Nate but we can make it public so that everybody can see what we have done during those two weeks a lot of the stuff is anyway publicly visible because it goes out of social media and stuff like that but if people want to see that we can make it public too so that I was going to see exactly what we have done every two weeks and that wraps up yeah thank you for coming