"Defy Your Own Gravity!" -- Lisa Sonne
Lisa Sonne has enjoyed possibilitating in the arts and sciences, entertainment and education. She also likes covering possibilitators in different media, and helping people become possibilitators.
Sonne has successfully written and produced award-winning documentaries, television series, concerts, events, magazine articles and books. She conceived and co-produced a ground-breaking concert uniting Russian and American musicians in Moscow and helped arrange for the video and recordings of the concert to be sent to the Mir space station.
As a Development Director at Stanford University, she broke fund-raising records. As Vice President of Education for SPACE.com, she helped launch the site in 1999, then conceived and created SpaceKids.com, an award-winning education site the first year it debuted.
For a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC television piece, she became "the first woman to fly underwater" when Graham Hawkes created the first underwater flying submersible. She also went weightless with cosmonauts and astronauts while on assignment for LIFE magazine in Russia, the first time the magazine covered space for almost 20 years. She pushed through underground passages with the first scientist to explore several unmapped caves in Mexico.
Sonne loves the eclectic and has visited all seven continents and dove in many seas. Her book, EVERYTHING 101, offers curiosity catalysts in subjects including, Literature, the Arts, History, Science, Math, Psychology, and Philosophy.
She has gotten married on three continents -- to the same man. Together with her husband, Victor Dorff, she founded a nonprofit and created a new way to help all US nonprofits. Charity Checks, a breakthrough, pioneering model that makes it possible for a donor to make a charitable contribution of a fixed amount, but allow someone else to choose the cause that would benefit from the donation, a concept later adopted by Network for Good online and by Facebook's commercial Causes program.
On their first date, Sonne expressed to Dorff her desire to bring back the 19th Century verb "to possibilitate." Dorff looked at her and said, "Let's be Possibilitators," coining a noun and winning a heart.
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