Ahoy, Passionate People,

Making progress on this nonprofit in February felt about as slow as digging out of Boston's record snowfall.  A lot of my energy went to the NELA Fetish Fair Fleamarket, where we had a great teasecraft/kinky crafter meetup. After polishing up our nonprofit strategic plan, I spent a lot of time working on our name. I plan to announce the final result next month!

To my dearest Passionate People,

I hope 2015 is going well for you all so far! I'm trying to stay warm despite all this snow we're getting in the Northeast. ;)

Money makes the world go 'round...I spent much of January working with fiscal projections and rough budgeting for the new nonprofit. Right now, I'm estimating our  crowd-directed grantmaking program will give away over $300,000 to sex-positive projects in its first 18 months. In order to make that happen, I'll have to raise at least $42,000 this year. I'm not ready yet, but...consider this a heads-up that I will be asking you all for donations later this year.

Happy New Year, Passionate People!

Hi, I'm Kit! 2015 is off to an exciting start for me: On New Year's Day, I started rolling out my new name (Kit) and my new preferred pronouns (they/their), and I came out as genderqueer. It took a long time for me to find my name, and I really appreciate the support of my husband and friends as I make this change.

Happy December, Passionate People!

The #sexletterschallenge is on! Last month I launched the Sex Letters Challenge, encouraging my friends to write letters to their teenage selves about what they wished they had known about sex. So far four of those letters have been published on The Sex Letters Project, which is run by my friend and fellow activist Nicole Mazzeo of Pleasure Pie.  Go check out these wonderful letters by Hazel, Jason, Micah, and Danielle (trigger warning), and then submit your own.

Good morning, Passionate People!

I was recently featured in the Fast Company piece, "Why The Future Of Sex Is Not (Necessarily) A Robot," by Lux Alptraum. Thanks to all the new subscribers who clicked on over from there!

In the piece, Lux describes me as running "a crowdfunding startup for sexuality-focused technology," which isn't the whole story. The whole story looks something more like this:

Happy Fall, Passionate People!

So far, October is off to a great start with a trip to the sex/tech conference Arse Elektronika in San Francisco.  

Kristen and her collaborator, open source hardware hacker Jimmie P. Rodgers,  also presented their project-in-progress, "Keeping It Up Under Pressure: A DIY Vacuum Casting Rig for Body Casting."  Once they get the kinks worked out of the system (so to speak), they'll post more information on Kristen's personal blog, The Toymaker Project.

Greetings, Passionate People!

Hopefully your summer has been as much of a blast as ours has!  Our travel continued with a trip to Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) X in NYC where our Fearless Leader Kristen gave an amazing talk, "The Sex Geek as Culture Hacker."

Share and enjoy her tales of sex geekery: the awesome, the awkward, and the randomness in between!

Ahoy, Passionate People,

June was an exciting time for us at Passionate Produce! A trip to Seattle meant that we got to connect with some of the wonderful sex geeks of the Northwest:

• Koe Creation is an up-and-coming sexuality educator who overwhelmed us with per enthusiasm for sex-positivity and per excitement about a non-profit Passionate Produce!
• Cunning Minx, the fabulous creator and host of the Polyamory Weekly podcast, graciously shared her time with us as well a host of wonderful ideas about how we can better serve sex-positive educators and activists as well as people who want to hear their message.
• Allena Gabosch, co-founder and Executive Director of The Center for Sex Positive Culture, let us pick her brain on founding and running a sexuality-based nonprofit.

Howdy Passionate People,

It's June already? When did that happen?

The past month has been full of research on non-profits and whether it makes sense to relaunch Passionate Produce that way:

What's new this month? Communication!
So. Much. Communication.

Since our last newsletter, we've started making regular, behind-the-scenes updates on Tumblr:

• Passionate about Fearlessness    A bleedingly honest post by our Fearless Leader about how things are going.
• The Big Picture
      A big-picture look at all of the amazing work we'd like to do.
• To Profit, or Not to Profit?
      Given all that Amazing Stuff, we're considering relaunching as a nonprofit(!)