I rarely get into posts of a more personal nature here on the blog, but as part of the staff reflection posts we here at GK do, I wanted to pay tribute to someone who has been a mentor to me and eventually influenced the type of work I have come to do in virtual and online spaces.
This past weekend on Sunday morning a truly amazing woman named Karen passed away. Most people within Second Life know her better as The Sojourner, or Soj as she liked to be called, who was a tireless community leader, mentor and friend to many.
She first was introduced to SL by John Lester (better known as Pathfinder Linden to those within SL) through his pioneering online group BrainTalk's early work within SL focusing on creating a virtual therapeutic and empowering space for those living with Aspberger's and other neurological disorders. The project focused on a sim called Brigadoon and Soj in support of her son who has Aspergers, came into SL to be part of the project.
She took to SL, and in not much time became an official Linden Lab Mentor. held weekly classes and helped those coming into SL. She was an advocate of the arts and music communities and took up residence in the early art's colony sim Montmarte and sponsored live music events when streaming audio into SL was a new feature. She also became the organizer of one of the earliest health support groups to be founded within Second Life, named Shockproof. It was a group created to support those dealing with strokes, she herself having been a multiple stroke survivor. From there she went on to create a community to tie together a lot of her interests, one that would bring together people in a supporting atmosphere and use creativity, collaborative building and learning as tools to heal and empower. This group was named appropriately Dreams.
I came to personally know The Sojourner when I was but a noob that hadn't even been in world a couple of months. I had an odd glitch to my SL client software release which caused the application to not launch normally, but rather I had to login through the secondlife.com online list of events (long before SLurls and point to point teleporting) that would then launch the client. Because of this, every session in SL for me was set up as a 'to do' list of what events might be nice to attend. I had just learned to create alpha textures and was excited to put them to use by attending the "How to create a tree" class that Shockproof and Dreams were putting on. Khamon Fate taught the class, but Soj played her role as host and helper. We both got to talking about being displaced gardener's of sorts and she encouraged me to enter into the garden competition that Dreams was hosting.
Until that point I had scarcely done more than create pictures and textures and just upload them onto prims so I was a bit daunted by the prospect of entering a building contest, but she assured me it was fun more than anything. That became one of many Dreams sponsored build contests I did. They helped ease my then noob self into building all while having the support of the Dreams community to guide me through the learning curve of SL's toolset.
Over the years, Soj grew the Dreams community to take up 2 private sims, have hundreds of combined members, hold regular events that were both community building, health and support related in nature and even organize the yearly Dreams Community Fair that would bring both real educational, health organizations and non-profits like American Cancer Society and SL grassroots philanthropic community groups like the Heron Society, Wheelies, Elven Circle and others. A fair focused around public good in virtual spaces all on display for fair goers to not only find out information about each group, but participate by building, listening to music, sharing poetry and stories and even getting a chance to dunk a Linden or two.
Through all of this, she still would keep time to reach out personally to those around her, always mentoring or offering support. Or, even in my case, just being a friend to share life stories with and update each other on what was going on within our lives (real and virtual). She would also never miss an opportunity to help support each other's causes and events and we worked a few times on each other's SL charitable causes. She did all this pretty selflessly, while going through the ups and downs of still suffering with having strokes and rehabilitating back from them and often living with pain.
Soj/Karen was one of the most amazing women I have come to know within a virtual space and I had hoped to meet her in person someday (we had often talked in the past about her coming to speak at SLCC but her health didn't end up allowing for it). I looked to her as a personal mentor and friend and will truly miss her.
I encourage others to search out the community she has created that is focused around the sim called Dreams. With amazing foresight as always, she left provisions so that the community will transfer and live on. A memorial for her has been set up there where you can light a candle, leave a donation or build a tribute. There is also an online memorial wiki that has been set up at http://tributetothesojourner.wikispaces.com/. You can find out about the support work for Aspergers and stroke survivors on the group site here. Finally, there is a great NPR Infinite Mind interview that included John Lester and Karen talking about the therapeutic possibilities of virtual world spaces and you can find that here.
[15:02] Rhiannon Chatnoir: you are always on my top 10 of amazing people in this space... just so you know
[15:02] Rhiannon Chatnoir: :)
[15:03] The Sojourner: Thanks Rhiannon...
[15:03] The Sojourner: :D
[15:03] Rhiannon Chatnoir: :)
Travel well my friend - we will hold true to your dreams.
Joyce Bettencourt / Rhiannon Chatnoir
On Tuesday, we continued to work on filming different parts of our movie. For the most part, my group Tibet is done filming and we are ready to edit. I started editing some parts that I filmed and they were coming out great. 
Constance Steinkuehler's 
