In December, the dRep Education Book Club was officially launched on the Leadership Academy Discord: https://discord.gg/y8FNFek6B2 and we gained 32 new members this month due to that announcement. The Discord has been set up to host a channel per book that we discuss, and will lead up to the first face to face book club meeting in mid-January. There is also a new space for community members to add any books they are currently reading and discuss the book with the community, so the book club is not limited to just the ones selected for this proposal. There has been higher engagement since moving from Telegram to Discord, so that is a good sign that this was a positive change.

The summer has slowed down progress on our initiative somewhat, but we hope to re-engage everyone in September and continue our forward progress.

We are combining with an SPO Accelerator proposal and bringing even more value to the SPOs involved in this project. We will be launching the SPO accelerator in a few week in partnership with Harry Hellyer and his team.

We are also starting to gather SPOs that are interested in working on a certification program and will kick off our first convening on May28. We have a community Discord and Telegram group formed for better communication.

On April 25, Nori participated on a panel discussion with other block chain experts on NFTs. This second event was all about NFTs and their utility. This was an interesting conversation and one other company on the panel was already using Cardano as the blockchain for their in-game NFT assets. The utility of NFTs beyond "art NFTs" was a good learning opportunity for much of the audience. We are planning a third conversation around DAOs in late June.

Sanada continues to host bi-weekly Pacific Town Hall. In May we had sessions on governance, presentations on impact projects on Cardano and block chain (Landano, Algae Token, and Nature Blocks), and we had some discussions around stake pool best practices and a review of Fund 8 and how it went for the community. Recordings of Pacific Town Hall are available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_yYJZg5No8

We have also hosted two Pacific Town Halls in April, one a fairly deep dive into what it takes to run an SPO, and the other discussing the need for a constitution in Cardano. Recordings of the Town Hall meetings can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkzzr15NShOxhnascFCo-w

In April, as COVID restrictions have lifted sufficiently, we hosted an in-person event to teach people about and discuss NFTs. This event was attended by over 20 people and lasted just over 2 hours. One of the panel speakers is building a game on top of Cardano and using NFTs to represent in-game items.

We have partnered with Edify to offer the Sakura SPO community an Impact Accelerator to help them strengthen their business and ultimately be more successful at running a stake pool. Our kick off meeting is recorded here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVG_lQc_kJQ

We have on-boarded a community manager (Jeremy Kiffiak) who will be reaching out to different SPO communities, and an SPO technical advisor (Bryan Lesiuk) who will be advising on Stake Pool best practices and creating a security audit to certify that SPOs are running good security practices.

Our discord server is here: https://discord.gg/dbuEjDPYKq

And our Telegram group: https://t.me/SakuraSPOs

We are convening our first meeting of SPOs and community projects on April 1 to launch this new network. We have partnered with Harry Hellyer and his team to offer SPOs business mentorship as the synergies between the groups seems to be highly aligned. We hope to take 15-20 SPOs through the accelerator program.

A Discord server has been set up to help build community and facilitate conversation for this group: https://discord.gg/dbuEjDPYKq

SANADA is now hosting the Pacific Town Hall. We've been holding them every two weeks, and the recordings of the meetings can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkzzr15NShOxhnascFCo-w and interested people can sign up via the Catalyst Community Meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/Cardano-Catalyst-Community-Network/

As the SANADA community manager, I have started networking at the KWENCH co-working space, and have connected with several local companies who are interested in building on top of Cardano, and have been attending local blockchain meetups to spread the word about Cardano and Catalyst.

I have also sat on an introduction to blockchain panel discussion and represented Cardano and explained the energy efficiency of the blockchain and how it's being used in various impact initiatives. There were 23 people in attendance and it turned into a nice conversation about blockchain in general, and Cardano in particular. It's worth noting that due to COVID, this was the first face to face event that I've been able to attend in person. It's nice to be able to meet people once again. We are now planning an NFT panel discussion for the end of April for part two of this series.