nathalie gensac
[santa barbara, ca]
founder of media4good and youth interactive and… and..
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interview- Focus on the Funk Zone
Published on Oct 4, 2012
The Funk Zone is Santa Barbara is home to artists, winemakers, non-profits and business owners who make their money by creative means.
Integrated into the Santa Barbara community right in the middle of the Funk Zone is Nat Gensac, the founder and president of Youth Interactive – a non-profit that exists for the purpose of empowering disadvantaged youth in the areas of Technology, Entrepreneurship and the Arts (T.E.A.)!
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Media4Good (M4G) was started as a new model of charity.
(the umbrella non-profit)
Social entrepreneur Natalie Gensac founded the production based organization in 2005 to use the power of media to reach out to a new generation of intelligent givers—people who need to know their contributions will truly make a sustainable difference in the global struggle against poverty and illiteracy. To that end she focused on the growing need for financial transparency in the charitable sector and on global communities that recognize film provides them with a voice, which allows their projects and messages to be more effective.
With the objectives clear, Gensac found a new way forward – media, business and partnerships to help raise funds, awareness and provide a positive, responsible approach to aid – Gensac uses her skills as a media producer, director and entrepreneur to promote the heroic efforts of effective charities and the people they serve. Her core focus is to support the two groups essential to social and economic advancement in our world today: women and children.
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Nathalie is a graduate of summerhill…
post on history of summerhill (at 90 yrs old) and some former students:
Gensac runs an educational charity raising money to help women and children in the developing world. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Until she was nine, Nathalie Gensac was home-schooled by her parents while they were travelling the hippy trail to Morocco. “Then they heard about Summerhill and it absolutely fitted their ideas,” she says.
Living in a small, inter-related community “means you have to take responsibility for your own actions, and that means everything from the clothes you wear to how you treat others. All that decision-making can be hard at times. Neill’s bottom line was that you could have freedom, but not if what you did interfered with others’ freedom.”
Gensac mostly went to lessons but remembers missing a couple of science sessions, then apologising. “My teacher said, ‘It doesn’t matter but it’s your loss.’ That really made me think.” She left Summerhill at the age of 15 with nine O-levels, including three science subjects.
Taking A-levels wasn’t really an option at Summerhill because there weren’t enough teachers to offer a wide enough variety of subjects, so Gensac went elsewhere. “There were people at college who disapproved of me because they thought I must have grown up with no discipline. One A-level teacher rounded on me when I disagreed with something he was saying and shouted: ‘I suppose you are the kid from Summerhill.'”
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find/follow Nathalie:
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et al..
be you. 