Learn
Serve
GiveOur Team
The Original Six “Seeds”:
John and Jean Yih Kingston
John is executive vice president and general counsel of Affiliated Managers Group, Inc., a Boston-based asset management company. Meanwhile, Jean oversees a truly startling range of domestic responsibilities, while valiantly trying to schedule time to follow her muse writing adolescent fiction. Together with their four children Caitlin, Annalise, Christopher, and William, the Kingston family is known for their athletic pursuits, their passionate loyalty to their beloved Red Sox, and their many friends of all ages in the Boston area.
John and Jean met as first-year students at the University of Pennsylvania. Jean also received a graduate degree in education at Penn, and John received a degree from Harvard Law School. While John (in particular) has been inclined to launch various community and social service projects in his day, John and Jean are pretty confident that they have never tried anything this far-reaching – and are extraordinarily grateful for their great partners in their lives (at work, in the community and in this project) that enable them to take on such an adventure.
The SixSeeds Staff:
Curtis Chang
Executive Director
Curtis has led a variety of non-profits over a 15 year career in Boston and the San Francisco Bay area. Before his role as Executive Director of SixSeeds, he served as the Executive Pastor and Teaching Pastor of The River Church Community in San Jose, CA. Curtis also has a longstanding connection to the university world, having occupied leadership roles for a national campus ministry and having taught as a Head Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Government Department. As a Rockefeller Fellow, he did development work in Soweto, South Africa during the turbulent end of the apartheid era and was one of the first non-blacks (and only Chinese American!) to reside in that township. That latter distinction served him well as the residents mistakenly assumed he was a martial arts expert and no one dared mess with his skinny 155lb frame. Curtis graduated from Harvard College with a B.A in Government, Summa Cum Laude, and has authored or contributed to four books.
Born in Taiwan and having grown up in Chicago, he retains a special longing for homemade Chinese cooking and a Cubs World Series victory. He is married to Jody Chang and has two young daughters, Mei-Mei and Ellie. He and his family reside in San Jose, CA.
Nancy French
Director of Public Relations
Nancy French is the author of Red State of Mind: How a Catfish Queen Reject Became a Liberty Belle. She began her writing career as a Philadelphia City Paper columnist tackling many subjects with a light, humorous touch; her articles have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Sun, Newsmax, the Philadelphia Daily News, and National Review Online. She regularly discusses the weekıs news events on national public radio's Weekend America. An alumna of David Lipscomb University and New York University, Nancy lives in Columbia, Tennessee with her husband David (also on the SixSeeds board), two children, and her Lowchen puppy Goggo.
Jenny Kim
Child Education Specialist
In her career in child education, Jenny Kim has taught social studies, researched gifted education, and created curriculum for Walden Media (producers of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). She has worked on films such as I Am David, Thirteen Days, and Amazing Grace. Her passion for curriculum writing also extended to Armenia when the US Department of State sent her to co-write internet based curriculum for student partnerships there and in the US. She currently is working as a part-time advisor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. During the early days of SixSeeds, Jenny was especially stalwart in providing key organizational assistance — right up to the last months of her pregnancy!
She’s married to John Kim who studies and works in the field of business solutions to poverty. They are busy loving their experience as novice parents and admit that Cailyn already has them wrapped around their finger. They also shamelessly will solicit any advice on childrearing!
Mark and Gayll Phifer-Houseman
Parenting Specialists
Mark and Gayll Phifer-Houseman have spent much of their lives thoughtfully cultivating virtue in the next generation. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz (where they met), they jointly pursued a twenty year career as university chaplains, mentors and directors of a retreat center. In 2003, they made the fateful decision to adopt a family of four older kids from post-civil war Ethiopia. The kids are now aged 22, 17, 15, and 13. This experience has given them a unique perspective on how the values of children are shaped in our contemporary setting. Drawing upon their experience, their advanced degrees in leadership development from Fuller Seminary, and years of personal study, the Phifer-Housemans have offered parenting seminars in local Bay Area contexts. They are increasingly sought after by parents for their counsel. They treasure the opportunity afforded by SixSeeds to study and reflect more on these issues — but they readily confess they are not baseball fans.
Patrick McPhail
Web Developer
Patrick helped create the original SixSeeds website in late 2006 and has been developing the current site since its conception in summer of '07. During the day he works for award-winning web and media developer iMarc in gorgeous Newburyport Massachusetts. He hopes the Yankee’s next playoff appearance coincides with a glacier covering Miami.
Our Board:
John Kingston — (Chairman of the Board)
Jean Kingston
Curtis Chang
Kurt Keilhacker:
Kurt Keilhacker is a Managing Partner of TechFund Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund with offices in California and France. He currently focuses on emerging networking, new media, and clean energy technologies. Previously, he worked in the tech sector and in international M&A. Kurt is a graduate of Wheaton and earned an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.L.A. from Stanford, and an M.T.S. from Harvard. He has also been active in a number of non-profit organizations focused on education or international economic development.
David French
In addition to his recent commission in the U.S. Army Reserve (81st Regional Readiness Command), David is a senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, and director of ADF's Center for Academic Freedom. The former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he also taught at Cornell Law School and served as a partner in a large law firm. He is the author of four books, and numerous op-eds. Regularly interviewed by both print and broadcast media, David has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, The Fox Report with Shepard Smith, Special Report with Brit Hume, and Your World with Neil Cavuto, among others, and dozens of radio programs around the country. Hailing from Georgetown, Kentucky, David is a graduate of Harvard Law School and David Lipscomb University. David now lives in Columbia, Tennessee with his wife Nancy, and two children, Camille and Austin. When David isn't defending constitutional liberties, he follows the Kentucky Wildcats and an occasional NASCAR race; he can also often be found online fighting orcs and other foul creatures, and is relishing his new-found rotisserie baseball successes.
Acknowledgments
The development of SixSeeds is a product of many contributions from many families and individuals. While we will continue to look for fitting ways to acknowledge these contributions in these spaces, we know we can't properly thank everyone who contributed ideas, feedback, encouragement, and even start up funds. However, we feel we really should publicly single out just a few specific contributions (with an apology to the people we inevitably will have failed to mention here).
Mark Basnage deserves enormous credit for helping us develop our vision, and producing all our initial materials (including our designs) and first website. This version of the site is a direct descendant of his labor.
Jeff and Tara Barneson were early champions of the concept with us and encouraged us to broaden the partnership with other families.
Scott MacLean, Carlos Austin, and Owen Joyce provided important encouragement and advice along the way. They helped us feel there really was something to this idea.
Kathryn Compton, Tom Slicklen and Steve Haas represented WorldVision in our partnership with such generosity and grace.
Patrick Nash and Ropes and Gray LLP provided wonderful pro bono legal services; Michelle Albertson, CPA similarly provided accounting counsel for free.
Finally, John would like to particularly thank his colleagues at AMG. He is very grateful to have the opportunity to work with an extraordinary set of partners and friends there — without the contributions of these remarkable partners (you all know who you are — we don't want to embarrass you by naming you here!) this initiative would not be possible.
…and countless others!