A thought experiment on ideas as currency with a real-time assessment tool in the form of an evolving Global UN and privately funded boarding school for underprivileged children, their families, and foster children.

I am normally a very humble person, so while I am honored to have the opportunity coupled with the physical and mental capabilities to list off all the great ideas, potentially world-changing ideas I have, I am only able to do so because I was supported by many different people. While I am about to use the word “I” more times than I ever have in my entire life, I hope when you hear it, you picture yourself in the situation because I do not care where you come from or what you have or have not accomplished in your life; you have something to add to the conversation. I am grateful to have this opportunity to share my thought experiment and to encourage others to see their ideas as a form of currency.

       For the past six years, I have written relentlessly about things that I had no business writing about. 

I’ve written to numerous world leaders with many well thought out ideas to solve current and future problems, this included the need for biodegradable food containers over Styrofoam that could actually be eaten, creating gigantic freezers on beaches or in the middle of the ocean to cool them, creating a golf ball that would dissolve only at certain depths and could be filled with different species of marine life. I thought that requiring or encouraging shipping boxes to be made from biodegradable materials with seeds embedded in them could be great to ease the strain on the recycling infrastructure and restore insect populations.

 I had small business ideas like using abandoned parking garages as a rentable space for people who want to put together classic cars but may live in an apartment or retirement home. This idea includes the space being used for community-building events, like classes hosted for kids to learn how to take apart carburetors, and maybe include it in a team-building activity for corporations. I shared these ideas openly and encouraged people who had the money or knowledge to establish them to do so. Sure, letting me know they were a great idea or maybe even seeing the entrepreneurial nature of my ideas would have been great.

But after trying that route by repeatedly trying to contact people who intimated me. I decided that I would always have more ideas, and I wanted to see what it would take to get a response. I guess I should acknowledge that fact that after receiving no response, I began to poke at these people. I did not just write these people. I poked at them by examining their sales or creative process against best practices or what I had learned over my own marketing career. I wouldn’t say that I actively wanted to annoy them but I was trying to see what it took to stand out in a sea of people. Unfortunately, in attempting to do so, I crossed boundaries within my small networking circle, resulting in pivotal losses.

Things didn't go well and they are not going well.

I had tried to establish myself on TikTok or YouTube, and while I got enough engagement for me to justify continuing, it was not the proper platform for me. I was talking about big issues, and the algorithm would spit them back out to me so that all that I was seeing all day were psychological statistics and negative news about the current state of the world, with the few random dancers thrown in for good measure.

I did not consider this to be healthy. Moreover, I thought about how impossible it is for anyone to contact influential people unless it is on one of these popular platforms. But not everyone has access to or the capability to use these devices. I was looking for a mentor or internship for a great idea, so I freely gave away what I considered to be some pretty lucrative ideas.

Also, I gave them away, because if they were established in a roundabout way, they positively affected my lineage. So why not? What was I going to do with them? I had more. So many more.

I wrote to 157 influential people about creating an educational short video form phone application that offered microlessons for school children. Picture someone important in a lab coat giving a chemistry lesson. I tried to gain feedback from the general public by posting these long comments on YouTube. This garnered me two responses. One of the young gentlemen indicated that his mind was blown by the amount I had written. No indication if that was a good or bad. Somewhere along the way, I also received a response from an account that portrayed itself as a very famous kind woman I was glad to see the response, but ultimately, couldn't verify that it was this very kind famous woman, so I couldn't add it  towards the data I was striving for at the time. 

       It was the beginning days of what I thought would be a state of transition for me. I was deciding which direction to take in my life. What lofty goals I wanted to examine within my life that were measurable, accessible, and would be long-lasting and wouldnt entirely kill me in the process. I wanted something that would allow me both the time to accomplish things and take part in a family environment. These initial thoughts shaped my decisions and allowed me the curious spark I needed. It was also the early days of Covid so that should let you know where my holistic mental wellbeing was. 

I spent a lot of time contemplating what the long-term effect on children and families would be.

After a time of not receiving any responses or even being able to capture anyone's attention to even engage in a negative discussion about the ideas, I began to think about it in a way of passion fueled by the anger of injustice. I refused to believe that all of these ideas had no merit, no value, that I couldn’t trade one good one for expert advice about how to bring about another one for my own monetary or philanthropic interests. So I wrote more.

Without any formal education, I repeatedly wrote the past five presidential administrations, most of their wives, the Army, Navy, and Air Force about important issues like the need for in-home manufacturing, stressed the need for Americans to have the opportunity to make an extra $80-150 a day in their spare time while watching television. This existed in the times when CD cases needed to be put together. 

 At the time, I was a 30-year-old high school dropout who had worked as a moderately successful telemarketer for 12 years and had just pivoted to kitchen manager at a fast food restaurant.

I knew what extra money could mean to people because I measured my hourly wage in how many gallons of milk I could buy with the money I was making for ensuring that a thousand dollars' worth of cheeseburgers and fries could go out hourly without any hiccups.

Luckily, my significant other carried the weight of most of our bills, but the delight he would have in knowing that we had an extra five hundred dollars a week from just assembling paper plates or something using a press machine could not be understated.

 Easing the strain even a little bit more would have had effects on many aspects of our family's life. While we were getting by, I was aware that it wasn’t by much, and we were not alone in that fact.

 I continued to write leaders repeatedly, encouraging them to create a system where the common citizen could ask a question, make a respectful statement, or share an idea that could mean something. Something like a Zoom meeting hosted on PBS. I recommended making it a requirement that the President view one two-hour video, max five minutes a person, weekly. I have real thoughts about whether the use of social media by anyone in the cabinet is constitutional because not everyone has access to those platforms, leading to an informational gap that seemed unfair.  Making this a requirement seemed like a fair trade to me.

If I were president, I would want to safely be able to gauge the holistic wellbeing of my citizens by offering them a platform to speak to me. Yes, let me see the pain on the homeless person's face as they implore me with the realities of what went wrong in order to arrive at their current circumstances so that we can address systems that repeatedly disappoint generations. Yes, let me see the actual family that is affected by funding threats to the school lunch program. Yes, there is a problem, lets brainstorm together. Not third hand, not second hand. Face to face through the safety of a screen.

  wrote them about integrating CSPAN into high school curriculum because it is an underutilized resource for the public school system. A few years later, I learned the skills to substantiate this claim by researching the differences in what students in Elite private boarding schools in America learn and what public school teaches.

I encouraged the newspaper to be produced with complete scholarly journals included. For fun and to encourage dying professions, I advocated for a strictly sports-based newspaper that was written by past players. It could have included movie reviews, cherished recipes, interesting anecdotes. 

I wrote like a lunatic for over half a decade without a single response directed at me.

 I did, however, get my son an invitation to meet former President Biden based on an email we sent when my son was five and home-schooled.

I was at work and received a mildly annoyed phone call. My partner said, “What did you do?” “What do you mean?” I asked. Thinking quickly. 

Work and home, that is what I did.

“Did you write the President?” his tone unbelieving yet somehow not surprised.

“Yes?!?”

“About what? You better just tell me because I just got off the phone with the White House.”

“Well, I don’t know about a lot of things…you have to be more specific…” I start rambling as I try to think what the latest email said.

“Dear President Biden,” He begins to read. “I am sorry your dog died…”

“What?” I shouted. “That’s the email that they answered. It’s from almost two years ago!”

The email was pretty short. It just said that we were sorry his dog died and that we encouraged the President to explore the benefits of installing solar panels in Section 8 apartments to offer residents the opportunity to lower their electric bills.

       Ultimately, my son's dad told me that I had come up with the idea and presenting it as if a five-year-old did was fraud.

I said absolutely not, it wasn’t at all. I said that Biden's hand was not the only president's hand that I was going to shake while pointing my finger towards the sky and almost shaking with excitement. Smiling like a child on my birthday.

But I did not push going for a handshake too hard, and I never shook his hand, and never got the opportunity to attempt to hand him a binder of ideas. Because after working side by side with me at one telemarketing job or another and being arguably a bit better, he knew what I had done, and he was right. 

Admittedly, by this time, I had written the Government so many times that I was sure I was on a list. Every time I wrote someone of consequence, my heart rate would speed up. I would have to take a shower from the sweat that was caused by the adrenaline of not only putting my ideas out there but writing with the expectation that I would eventually get a response.

Yes, the initial contact was nerve-racking and at times tedious, but what really caused my heart rate to speed up was preparing myself with how I would justify being no one and wanting to make a difference in a non-typical way. What happens if I ever get a response?

I knew my approach to starting businesses and nonprofits was not normal. I shot for the top with every communication. I did not have the time, knowledge, or economic means to fumble my way through the process.

I thought that surely with enough persistence, it would pay off. I was doing what I could when I could with what I had, a mind that refused to be silenced, a keyboard, communication skills, and the ability to type 74 words per minute.

Over the years, I had to acknowledge that this hobby was not entirely healthy and would try to convince myself to just give up and live an average life.

From geese planes and fireworks being used to clear pollution to capitalizing on the need for self-sanitizing door handles in all Government buildings, I was convinced I could terraform Mars if I were given an inch of monetary breathing room and an ounce of subject knowledge. In the beginning, in my daily life offline, I would try and talk about my ideas, but after a time, I stopped telling anyone that I was still pursuing this experiment of what it takes to get a response.

So, when it had been almost two and a half years of writing, I changed tactics and started to overutilize my marketing knowledge and overconceptualize my emails to leaders. I had held off on doing that. I did not want to manipulate the situation in any way; I wanted my character, presentation, and ideas to stand on their own. But marketing exists for a reason, and I was unwilling to let the hard-earned knowledge gained by making four hundred phone calls a day for twelve years go to waste, so I tried again.

I took what I learned from a career in marketing and appealed to the emotion and unique viewpoint from an unexpected source to capture the readers' attention. For the record, my five-year-old and I did have a homeschool lesson about solar power and the importance of everyone having the opportunity to lower their electric bill, so it was not completely fraudulent. 

There were a couple of ideas I just could not give up on. One of which was the self-sanitizing door handle, an idea that had come to me in 2014 alongside my partner late one night after watching an invenstor show, My partner sneezed, and I handed him a tissue. At the same time, I looked at the door handle and was struck by lightning.

I leaped out of bed and ran to the door handle and looked at him with a goofy smile and said, “You know what is a great idea?” 

Since then, the idea has transformed from a door handle that is covered in tissue paper, and each time it is opened or closed, you are touching a clean tissue that then gets pulled off as you let go of the handle. Then to a specific model that had holes in it and a container of witch hazel or other allergy-friendly sanitizer. This idea had a few downfalls, including allergy risks, potential lawsuits, and the need to replace all door handles and rekey them. However, it did offer advantages for revenue via reupping the sanitizer through the company and maybe a partnership with DeWalt.

Ultimately, the idea that it has landed on is simple. A two-piece unit that surrounds an already existing door handle with a motion-censored disinfecting UV light. No screws. Easy 3M sticky application. Leaves no marks after removing. When I initially started trying to trade ideas, this one was one I held to be greater than great. I ran the numbers. There are a lot of door handles out there. The research on germs being spread on door handles and the cost of employees getting sick is expansive.  

Remember how I said that throughout this all, I was just giving my ideas away. Not this one. Please don’t take this one. This one is for the school.

Over the years, as I reached out to these leaders of the world and enterprise, I would give an idea and then mention the one that I wanted to be my legacy.

The idea stems from a documentary that I watched.. In India, there exists a boarding school where the poorest families from the poorest villages are invited to let one child from their family attend school. The school provides all care, housing, and schooling throughout college from the age of four, with the idea being that once they graduate with high-paying jobs like doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, scientists of all kinds, they would go back to the communities they were born in and raise them organically.

When I analyzed this concept, I was left in astonishment about the things a process like this could change. I could not for the life of me figure out why America was not doing something similar.

This school sparked all but one of my good ideas. It is because of the eloquent way actual poverty was showcased in that documentary that I finished my high school degree and graduated with a Bachelor's in Early Childhood Education with Honors and am continuing my education..

All in 4 years' time, I established myself academically to support my advocacy efforts because after knowing that this school existed, that someone else went out and is making an impact is such a plausible monumental way that I could make a difference in a small way at least. I believed what the young woman in the the trailer had said about being different.

 It is because of this and an upbringing that encouraged me to have empathy and acknowledge atrocities that I have sent a thousand messages with one response.

If you recall, I told you that I have never received any responses in my pursuit of trying to get an opinion about philanthropic or business ideas besides the arguably fraudulent one.

I may be an unreliable narrator because, after all those emails and after almost six years of almost complete silence, I wrote to this school for an Interview and it was granted.

I would love to say that I nailed the interview and asked the most interesting questions, that I am absolutely astonished at these things. But I was not and am not overly pleased with my performance. 

 It was my senior year and I had to create a final project for my Honors program. Creating an idea that offered a solution to one of the 16 UN Sustainability issues. Late one night, I was wavering between tackling equal education with the boarding school idea that, since 2020, had significantly developed into a thought experiment that was well supported with scholarly and credible sources, or using the dissolvable golf ball filled with marine life as a solution for water issues.

I decided that an interesting element to include in this project would be to interview an expert about the topic. In an almost joking manner, I looked at the clock, it was about ten to 9. Already a bit past the time I liked to be unwinding with no tech. But 9 was the cut off time for this sort of thing so I had ten minutes to spare.

I huffed to myself and thought, “Well, I do have a reason to write now.”

I sat down, briefly reviewed the institutes website, and quickly wrote one of the shortest emails yet, and included a link to a Google page that I had developed so I could send out more emails by not having to rewrite the entirety of the idea for every connection request in a Harry Potter-sized message. I also used this link to make memes to at people on twitter.

 I took a chance, this time resigned to the fact that out of all the people I had written,  this one I was the most certain would not write me back. Off went the lights, down went the laptop screen and away I went to bed to fall asleep to my documentaries and dream of building Space Hospitals.

       Much to my surprise, I woke up the next morning and saw an email from one of the executive administrators inviting me to pick a date from her calendar. She said she would be more than happy to give me thirty minutes.

There was an initial audible eek of glee that rapidly transitioned to a moment of panic and thoughts of what I had done, and a momentary thought of cancelling. But those feelings happened rapidly. All of them in a ten-second window.

After those knee-jerk reactions passed, I knew I had to see what would happen. I had to see how I presented the idea to someone face-to-face.

 After six years, I needed to assess how based in reality this pursuit of mine actually was.

I had started to question my sanity and had begun to wonder if my time was not spent better elsewhere, whether writing with these marginally impactful ideas really was a sign that I had delusions of grandeur.

This interview wasn’t for the project; it was deeply personal and It was my make it or break it point. However. I tried to take all of the emotion out of it. I tried to think of it as no big deal. In the end I think the interview suffered from this.

 I scheduled the interview for a couple of weeks away to try and give myself time to gather all the research and try to both expand and narrow the scope of the project.

Up until 2025 (this year), I had only really thought of the idea as being in America with the minor possibility of partnering with a couple of foreign countries to create a circular economy and give chances for children to experience different cultures firsthand to improve empathy and overall cognition.

With the honors project came the challenge of figuring out if this was a viable global solution for equal education.

Ultimately, I was well prepared for the interview but not quite where I wanted to be. One of the biggest blunders I think I committed was my attempt to describe how disconcerting it was when I reached out to famous people who had come from generational poverty, inner cities, or rural areas and would get no response with any opinions, positive or negative.  I did not use inappropriate or disrespectful language, but I could have phrased it better.

One question that I am hoping to ask the doctor who started this school in India one day is when he conceptualized the idea, how long did he hypothesize it would take to see the real-time ripple effects.

When preparing the interview questions, I grappled with how I wanted to approach the topic of how it is funded. Out of respect for their culture, I thought it might be rude to just ask how they pay for everything or how much it specifically costs to run yearly.

One of my final questions was about whether they received grants from the UN. She indicated that she didn’t have the information in front of her, but she didn’t think so, and if they did, it was a couple of small ones.

I ended the conversation by asking her why she responded to my email.

She looked a bit shocked by the question. But quickly pulled up my email to see if there was anything that really stuck out to her. In the end, she landed with something close to “This is what the founder wants from the school. He wants the idea expanded and he would agree that this is a viable solution to the issue of equal education.”

I thanked her profusely and asked her for her Naan receipe that she makes every Sunday at the school. She said she would send it along. It has not appeared yet, but an invitation to talk about volunteering has , so I am looking forward to learning it in person one day.

Since that time, I have completed the video presentation for my honors project, and it has allowed me to gather data on the state of schooling across the globe. I am still slowly plodding away at it. Trying to polish it enough for it to have merit in academic and political circles.

Recently, I will admit that I have considered taking dire measures by contacting famous, wealthy or influential people with the idea of creating a super-secret society that just comes out and bams solves the education issue with an infrastructure that supports circular economics, green energy and has so many benefits to communities wellbeing through psychological benefits.

I am even willing to exchange ideas for cash for this project. You could consider yourself the first patrons of The Bank of Kate. Each year, we could gather dressed as what we wanted to be as kids when we grew up, and I would allow the secret society members to make one withdrawal from my ever-growing bank of ideas.

       For example, a basketball person has his own shoe brand and has daughters. There is all this research about the importance of athletic shoes that are made well, but there is no specific line of shoes that is geared towards a growing teenage girl's feet. Wear the wrong pair of heels too many times, and feet can end up deformed and ultimately affect walking. 

Create a line of shoes that scientifically caters to the needs of a growing girl's feet and donate five hundred thousand dollars to this concept. Become the first bank Patron. Please.

In the early years of this project, I began to think of myself as a future President of the United States. I would envision myself standing on a platform in a felt skirt that had pizza slices embellished on it, something comparable to Mrs. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus. And is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with believing that with the correct system and support, you could be anything you wanted?

That is the platform that we need. We do not need another TikTok, Vine, or YouTube.

We need a platform where the exchange of ideas as a form of currency is the purpose.

Moreover, we need to encourage newly digital citizens, a.k.a. children and teens, to meticulously record their opinions and ideas on topics they find important throughout their lives. It takes all of us. And as another lover of a good thought experiment said, “Time is Relative”. Who is to say that someone's observations, opinions, and ideas will have no merit in twenty years? Who is to say that you can not be a common citizen and create a portfolio of your political, international, and ideological beliefs that could eventually support your platform for change or otherwise serve as a form of currency when you have nothing else? Not just a form of currency, a bulletproof form of transparency. 

The hardest part of the boarding school project is the difficult topics that must be addressed. Like the rate of adverse experiences for families who face economic hardships.

This means that I need to ask groups of people whether a system like this might have affected how their lives went.

If, when they imagined someone offering them the opportunity to move to the middle of nowhere and learn a trade, coping skills, and know that their children were close enough, and were well cared for and educated as if they were royalty, would they have been open to doing or considering it. Being from America and knowing the culture and negative connotations surrounding Government-funded boarding schools, I would say this is an important step not just in America but globally.

To accomplish this, I am fully prepared to offer my example of a shopping platform where the goods are handcrafted by people who had previously been incarcerated in exchange for data from a nonprofit that already has established connections within these systems. The website would be like Etsy for felons who may struggle with finding a job but are able to create something that someone else wants to buy. The concept is supported by research into a successful program that exists in a Texas prison where they teach inmates how to start and run a small business. I call it "Morality Mainstays".

Through my continued education, I have learned that the solution to a problem should not be concrete but a persuasive rhetoric with a call to action that is research-based.

This is my solution. A call to action to research a global system of UN and privately funded boarding schools that accept only underprivileged students, their immediate nuclear family, and foster children.

This is your official invitation to participate in an interesting and important thought experiment.

 I want to know what the effects of emptying out the inner cities and revitalizing the physical aspects are, organically increasing the need for trades, and supporting the gaps both economically and psychologically by offering families the opportunity to heal traumas caused by generational poverty. I want to head off any lingering negative impacts that families and children suffered from the trauma of possible shortsightedness.

I want to create circular economies that include using unexpected resources and outdated technology to keep costs low while concurrently exploring the positive and negative connotations of capitalizing or creating AI micro expression analysis technology to ensure transparency and possibly ease the transition of parents and caretakers being able to recognize simple micro expressions to navigate the recovery from Adverse Childhood Experience's. 

So, please join me in gathering the resources to determine if Project Restart, inspired by a working example of change through an educational institute and a lifetime of paying attention to the cracks ultimately funded by the Bank of Kate, has true merits as a global solution to the sustainability issue of equal education and could create a positive trajectory for us all.

You do not have to do it for free.

Chances are, I have an idea or two for you. And you would not be alone. While I admit at times pursuing this, I have felt sick, I have overextended myself and not had a clear balance, but as Bob Santos said, "The longer our trail of regrets, the more we tend to value the importance of making wise decisions."

I continue to slowly evolve the idea of a UN and privately funded boarding school. I understand the sheer volume of people that this scope could include, but I remain hopeful that it can be a large project.

 My most recent efforts include reaching out to specific academics in fields like poverty, finance, political science, history, and psychology to gain insight and opinions.

One fun development is a resource that allows people to explore how certain community inputs would affect current and future generations through a dedicated Minecraft server.

As of January 2026, I have run simple simulations that show that taking one million children that live in poverty in the United States and educating them at an elite level while offering parents access to trade school would eliminate the other ten million in a generation. The cost? 90 billion annually. 

My latest currency ideas, which I am trying to brainstorm with and bothering people about, include advocating for an after-school club that teaches kids how to start and run a business, and the idea of a mobile hospice vehicle. Kind of like an Ambulance with a clear side to it so that people can see the country for the first or last time. Now that I think of it, I wrote someone else a pretty cool idea about that one, too; however, I presented the idea in the form of a double-decker bus with clear sides so children and their families could have the experience together.

I considered concluding this by saying that I had changed my mind. That, in the spirit of this thought experiment of ideas as currency, I take it all back. That my ideas are no longer free and require payment in the form of mentorship or cold, hard cash.

But that would eliminate the larger thought experiment. One that I have dedicated my life to, can I use the Bank of Kate, which is solely filled with nonconcrete ideas, as a form of currency to fund at least the research infrastructure of creating a global system of boarding schools? What does it take to get a response?

In the end, after writing all this, I asked myself, “Why TED Talk?”

I feel that this stage and the processes, policies, and legacy that Ted has created are the only ones where the whiteboard meant for brainstorming sessions is homemade. The frame a picture collage of successful sessions. The board's cleaning spray a concoction of the relentless belief that differences must be put aside to make real lasting change for us all.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.