Scrolling through Welcome.us and FWD.us, Kansas Citian Ilya Tabakh was struck by how few of the stories shared on the site reflected his own experience—that of an immigrant, now entrepreneur, who relocated to the Heartland.
“The Midwest was very under-represented in stories,” Tabakh told SPN. “It was just a reminder that those experiences weren’t part of the conversation.”
Tabakh is the co-founder of “interaction agency” Somametric, but many may recognize him as the organizer behind 1 Billion Bits, which gathers engineers, CTOs, developers and more on a monthly basis to figure out what’s possible with a Gigabit of bandwidth.
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After seeing so few story submissions from the Midwest last month during Immigrant Heritage Month, Tabakh decided it would be a good time to start changing that dynamic.
“It seemed like a good time to actually move on things rather than just complaining about it,” he added.
The project, tentatively called the KC International Initiative, will help document the stories and accomplishments of immigrants who have made the Midwest, specifically the Kansas City area, their home. He’s joined up with local integrated marketing firm Global Prairie and media production company The Feral Few to bring those stories to life.
“Whether we realize it or not, we’re connected to the world and there’s some really interesting things going on that people from KC and all over the place are doing,” Tabakh said. “We need to own those stories and participate in the conversation.
“We always talk about a global economy and about global issues, but we lose site of how connected we really are. We need to own that and be able to share those stories.”
He has some ideas on how to share the stories and how to utilize all the information so that potential visitors and residents can interact with other immigrants, but it’s all in the earliest of stages. There’s definitely much more to come, he says.
Have a story to share? Submit an application to the KC International Initiative.
