Ambassador Spotlight - Birgitte Rasine, LUCITÀ
In each newsletter, we feature an Ambassador Spotlight, introducing you to one of our Ambassadors. This month, we would like to introduce you to Shift of the Ages Ambassador-Affiliate, Birgitte Rasine:
About Birgitte
A deeply introspective thinker, prolific photographer and award-winning poet, Birgitte is a writer, journalist and the producer of the Mayan Calendar Portal , one of the most active online communities devoted to the Sacred Mayan Calendar in the world. She is also the founder and chief evolution officer of LUCITÀ , a hybrid design and communications company specializing in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. In this capacity she has given talks and speeches internationally on the topic of socially responsible media & design, has worked with business, government, civil society, science & academia, and the media, and is actively involved in numerous professional associations and networks dedicated to sustainability, spirituality and green business.
Fascinated by ancient cultures at a very early age, Birgitte has gained a life-long respect for and admiration of the long-standing traditions of culture and knowledge that the human race has developed over the millennia of its relatively brief existence on this planet. She was raised with a profound love of and respect for nature and all of its living beings, a love that has only deepened with time and a growing understanding of the ways in which modern society and industry impacts the planet and its natural systems. Finally, as a writer and poet, she is deeply interested in the concept of time and its role and impact on human life and civilization—and in her words, “…these three great passions made it quite natural that my life’s path would ultimately lead me to the Mayan Calendar.”
Birgitte’s Mayan Calendar journey began in 2006, when Dr. Carl Calleman approached LUCITÀ with a request to design and build an online portal to centralize information about the Mayan Calendar. The result was a beautifully designed portal web site, with a unique visual representation of the symbols of the sacred Tzolk’in. The Mayan Calendar Portal, or MCP as it is affectionately called by its community, was relaunched in its 2.0 format on September 9, 2009, the start of a new Tzolk’in round, incorporating social media platforms, blogs from Carl, Ken Johnson, Barbara Sadtler and others, a photography, video and image gallery, user-generated content, and sacred Mayan birthday and love e-cards, among many other new features.
Fully dedicated to the Mayan Calendar and the message of the Maya elders, Birgitte has donated a great deal of her personal time in support of the Shift of the Ages film project as well as CommonPassion.org, ranging from communications consultancy to social & media outreach to writing and editing press releases and other materials. She also composes poetic interpretations of the daily Tzolk’in energies which are posted on the MCP’s ever-expanding Facebook fan page.
Since working with Carl, Birgitte has come to know many other actors in the world of the Mayan Calendar, including Shift of the Ages Director Steve Copeland, CommonPassion.org Executive Director Joseph Giove, Mike Shore of Mayan Majix, author Kenneth Johnson, and many others. She has become an active force in ensuring that the information being made available to the public about the Mayan Calendar remains as objective, fact-based and free of hyperbole, sensationalism and fear, as possible.
Birgitte holds a BA in Aesthetics of Film from Stanford University, studied cinematography at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, California, and completed a professional masters degree in international relations at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid, Spain. A bilingual Spanish/English speaker and tireless traveler, Birgitte feels equally at home swimming ancient Maya waterways in the Yucatán as she does speaking at international conferences, and hopes to do a lot more of both.
Since the MCP became a Shift of the Ages Ambassador-Affiliate in late fall 2009, the portal has generated over $1,100 in referred sales for the documentary film.
