It’s finally here!
I’ve been dreaming of verashni.com for years.
This is a space where I can offer my professional services.
These have expanded over my career to three main categories:
Digital management services:
This includes the normal digital services like web and app development, animations and putting together digital teams to exciting innovations in AI-driven and machine learning solutions to help companies be more efficient and innovative. I work with skilled partners I have formed relationships with over the years while building digital departments and platforms for many media houses.
Writing and media production
I am still a writer and reporter at heart but I have since expanded into radio and audio production, thanks to my work on my media start-up, www.explain.co.za and my WhatsApp news channel. I am able to do research, reporting, and multimedia projects, again working with trusted partners I have built up throughout my career.
Speaking
From event MC-ing to training, keynote addresses, moderating and other public speaking engagements, I have received glowing testimonials from clients who have used my services – from investment houses and multinationals to churches and schools. You can see more here.
Topics I have covered include:
- Training on handling media interviews, getting media attention and managing PR crisis and disasters
- Putting in place proper policies to preempt and avoid social media disasters
- Media freedom
- South African politics and current affairs
- Climbing the corporate ladder and learning management and strategy at a young age
- The growing culture of cyberbullying, following my break-through TedX talk on the cost of shame, drawing on the brutal lessons of cyberbullying during my time as editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian and HuffPost SA.
- Diversity and transformation
- Faith-based talks, as a Christian woman and writer
But verashni.com is also a place where I can share my experiences and journey as a woman who has been thrust into the spotlight at various times in my career, who has experienced failure and redemption, and as someone who is a South African, sister, daughter, wife and new mother. For the first time, I am allowing myself to express all aspects of myself – from my political views which is perhaps all you’ve heard from me previously – to my journey through life. For so long I have held close to my chest the lessons I have learned, often through great difficulty. I have realised that this instinct to protect myself, though born out of understandable reasons given the bullying I’ve been exposed, is not only wrong, it’s limiting. There exists a phrase: don’t waste your suffering. I didn’t like the judgment it implied: For so many years I already felt there were so many burdens on my shoulders: sharing how I was recovering from various iterations of hardship and failure wasn’t one I wanted to carry too.
But now I realise that this is how one grows and more importantly, how we as a society grow. Even if I help just one person, it is my duty to share.
Three years after the devastating experiences at HuffPost South Africa I still meet people who express their admiration for me, for how I “bounced back”. But the fact is, beyond the difficulties I’ve faced publicly in my life, there have been many other private hardships, lessons and rejoicings. Given how harshly people can judge one publicly I have kept these to myself. But I no longer want to live a small life. I want to invite you in, via this blog.
Welcome.