Author Kalimah Priforce

Kalimah Priforce is a madman with an idea whose time has come - Qykno, Careerspotting 4 Kids - using video storytelling & social gaming to make Career Day, Every Day for 12-21 year olds. He is passionate about innovation that transforms children's lives in and outside the classroom. At 8 years old, he held a successful hunger strike against his Bedford-Stuyvesant group home to add more books to its library. At 14, a chance meeting with Dr. Lorraine Monroe, an education innovator in Harlem NY, sowed the seeds of his dream to be a world-class educator, but it wasn't until October 1st, 2000, when his 18 year old younger brother was shot and killed that he formed a lifelong commitment to innovating education. For the past twelve years, Kalimah's progressive and inclusive "our kids, our future" approach to youth development has stood at the intersection of technology and the classroom, and has made him a favorite among K-12 youth, parents, teachers, technologists, and private to public partnerships as a highly regarded presenter and visionary. He has held several key positions in the non-profit and corporate world before venturing on his own at 22 when he co-founded the Thurgood Marshall Club of America, a youth-led startup between the Gallup Organization, the CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise, and the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund that focused primarily on student capacity-building through leadership incubator programs. He holds a CUNY BA degree in Global Business Strategy & Urban Youth Studies that has included coursework from Shanghai University, Universita per Stranieiri, and University of Oxford. Kalimah’s bootstrapping adventures as a young minority tech entrepreneur are chronicled in his blog “Hackademia.” He recently relocated his education startup from Brooklyn, New York to Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. To learn more about Qykno, please visit The Qyknome Project: http://www.qykno.com.