Full Bio
Karen Elkins
Thirteen schools
I was born in 1955. Before I finished high school I had lived in France, in Spain, in the Marshall Islands, and in Oakland, and I had been through thirteen schools. When you start out young you cannot see the path ahead. It is only later that you see the threads and how everything laces. Those years gave me my first thread: a respect for other cultures, other people’s tapestries, and the recognition that the world is far more enmeshed in each other’s gifts than it looks.
Learning by doing
My training was short and my education has been long. In high school I was given a summer scholarship to the Academy of Art in San Francisco; out of 2,000 students, five were picked, and I was one of the lucky ones. I earned an AA in Commercial Art from Chabot College. That is the whole of my formal paperwork. Everything since has been, as I like to say, degrees earned in the hot seat.
My first real jobs, from eighteen to about twenty-one, were with two companies that produced instructional material for the military, mostly for the P-3 aircraft and helicopters. The first was in San Francisco, in the art department, coordinating for the president. The second was at Moffett Field, coordinating projects for the manager. I learned how to take something technical and make it understandable, and I learned how to get a complicated job out the door.
Elkins Creative Services, 1977 to 1994
At twenty-one I moved to Los Angeles to chase the fashion industry. I lasted six months at one small agency and was hired by a more credible one, where I was fired because I could not type, spell or sell. That firing was the best thing that happened to me. I started my own business, Elkins Creative Services, as a sole proprietor, and within a short order I was handed every small ad from Women’s Wear Daily that nobody else wanted to touch.
For the first ten years the work was all fashion, trade to trade: account coordinating, budgeting, photo shoots, everything it takes to create a print ad. I facilitated ads for Women’s Wear Daily, Dallas Apparel News and California Apparel News, and built my own long-standing clients: Campus Casuals, Elizabeth Stewart Swimwear, Nino Wong, the uniform catalogue for United Airlines. My office was in the old Helms Bakery building, with three freelance designers and two photographers down the hall. I never hired an employee. I found the right people and brought them together, and that turned out to be the skill underneath all the others.
Around year ten I met the vice-president of Infinity Speakers at an event, did a spec job for him, and walked into consumer electronics. That led to JBL, Harman Kardon, Harman Corporate and Infinity, and to advertising and promotional material that reached more than sixty countries. The agency ran about nineteen years and ended in 1994, when the Northridge earthquake collapsed client after client, from Vivitar to Harman. It was a good run, and I had a lot of fun.
The years between, 1995 to about 2000
I stepped away from the agency, became a mom. I travelled on film locations with my husband and son who was a DP in the film business. I never missed an aquarium or museum in any city we landed in. Then we settled in Vancouver, BC. I got involved, then started working with community centres to bring lunch programmes to kids, from science to checkers to soccer. Without quite noticing, I had turned from clients to children.
Silbury Education & Resource Centre
For three years I led the Vancouver gifted association’s programmes: monthly events for children and adults, and an international conference every year. I spent about a year on my own re-threading the British Columbia curriculum into connected themes, because I could see that the connections between subjects were the subject.
Then, from around 2004 to 2009, I co-founded and directed Silbury Education and Resource Center, a school for gifted and creative kids who just did not fit the system. I was the acting “principal” and creative architect of an interdisciplinary curriculum
from kindergarten through Grade 7. I hired teachers and subject specialists and created partnerships across museums, science centres and the community. I consulted in gifted education and found myself on The Bill Good Show, CBC, CKNW and CHMB, and in The Vancouver Sun, The Province, The Vancouver Courier and the North Shore News. Shared Vision magazine called me a visionary. I never made a dime at Silbury. It was an active passion, and the kids wanted to come back, which was the only review that mattered.
Bringing the big ideas to town, 2007 to 2009 and after
In the final years of Silbury I partnered with Donna Visocky on the Extraordinary Speakers Series, bringing best-selling authors to Vancouver in the evenings: Dr. Joe Dispenza, Lynne McTaggart, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Freddy Silva, Dr. James Oschman. I worked with Banyen Books to support their speakers, and later hosted other series with Questers. I learned how to put an audience and a big idea in the same room, and I discovered that this was where I was happiest.
