EP. 42: A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY BEST, FOUNDER OF SEED&SPARK

The producers behind the Female Voices Rock Film Festival bring you Female Voices The Virtual Filmmaking Summit and this podcast episode! This episode was a live-stream recording that took place in early May 2020, and is a conversation with Emily Best, founder and CEO of Seed&Spark moderated by Pink Among Men host, Amy DePaola.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform that bridges online and offline experiences to make entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected and essential. Seed&Spark’s platform and national education program have helped thousands of bold storytellers raise millions to bring to life entirely new stories. 

An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. 

In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, Best produces film, series, and VR that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW and other festivals. Best produced projects including “Like the Water,” a feature film starring Caitlin FitzGerald (“Masters of Sex,” “UnREAL”); “Fck Yes!,” a digital series about sexual consent which she also co-wrote and co-directed; Janicza Bravo’s virtual reality film “Hard World for Small Things” which premiered at Sundance; and James Kaelan’s “The Visitor,” which premiered at Slamdance and was featured at Tribeca.

Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal “Woman of Influence”, a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country’s top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.

ALSO in this episode our #WCW Women Crushing-It is a young woman from Newport Beach, CA, Chloe-Mei Espinosa!! Chloe is an 8th-grader and the founder of the Skip the Plastic Straw campaign, and she's ready to bring it to the next level.

Chloe started the Skip the Plastic Straw campaign in the sixth grade, from a passion project that my class participated in. For her project she chose to campaign against the use of single-use plastic straws, and she built a website in April 2018 to start.

From Chloe: "I know it may seem ridiculous to get rid of single-use plastic straws, but our oceans need our help NOW and nothing is impossible!"

Her first goal was to get 500 people to take the pledge and stop using single-use plastic straws. (She reached that goal in May 2018!) Now, she will take on other projects that can help spread the Skip the Plastic Straw message. Check out her blog to see what else she is working on!

All the research on this website was done by Chloe to further her mission, and you can help her by taking the pledge and by printing out the restaurant flyer (in Resources) to give to your favorite restaurants. Stop the use of single-use plastic straws. Let's save the ocean planet together! Click here to go to the Skip The Plastic Straw Website and join Chloe!