Our Story
(l-r) Vinitha Nair, Kay Stephens
We started off as colleagues and became good friends over the last decade, combining our mentoring of teens and social media experience into the heart of this workbook.
From 2001-2011, Vini was the Executive Director of Platform Shoes Forum, a Maine nonprofit that provided businesses and organizations dynamic creative content through the latest kid-friendly digital mediums. She co-created Zoey's Room, an award-winning after-school and online program for tween girls, which encouraged them toward science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. Kay was Zoey's Room's Program Administrator for eight years during the 2000s when teens and tweens began to embrace social media in staggering numbers. Running Zoey's Room with hundreds of regional students in New England, Kay not only created the program's Internet Safety policy, but also a series of Internet Safety/Cyberbullying workshops. These were the first known workshop series on this topic throughout the state of Maine, at a pivotal time when Maine led the nation’s first 1-1 computer movement, providing each middle school and high school student personal ownership of a laptop with Internet access.
After the tragic suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier in 2006, Kay began to work on a series of young adult novels about cyberbullying. She asked Vini to help her co-write an educator workbook around digital tactics to go with the novels. Soon, the project took on a much larger scope. With some financial support from Maine Girls Collaborative Project and an exclusive sponsorship from Time Warner Cable, Kay and Vini spent five years researching cyberbullying tactics and testing out their impact on teens ages 10-18 in nearly a dozen focus groups and workshops throughout New England. Cyberslammed is the result of this work and is geared to educators, parents and students in 5th to 12th grade with the intent to decrease incidents of cyberbullying by encouraging self-protection in digital environments.
Author Bios
Kay Stephens is an author and a freelance writer with more than 20 years of experience working with teens and tweens in New England as a mentor and educator. A regular contributor to Maine newspapers and magazines, she also runs her own creative content and social media business and is currently at work on young adult novels with a cyberbullying theme.
Vinitha Nair is the Co-Founder and a Board member of Platform Shoes Forum, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that builds digital learning networks with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education for middle and high school students. Since the nonprofit’s launch, Vinitha has worked to promote workforce diversity and gender equity by helping establish statewide coalitions and promoting initiatives to influence change in this area.
Vinitha Nair is the Co-Founder and a Board member of Platform Shoes Forum, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that builds digital learning networks with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education for middle and high school students. Since the nonprofit’s launch, Vinitha has worked to promote workforce diversity and gender equity by helping establish statewide coalitions and promoting initiatives to influence change in this area.
