Today I’m celebrating the start of a crowdfunding campaign to get enough support for a 10-week facilitator course: www.eerstehulpbijgesprekken.nl
What I’m particularly celebrating are two things.
1. Only do things that I have support for
As I wrote in my strategy for the fall and winter, I want to be part of a team that works together on a daily basis: a nonviolent A-Team. My tactic to achieving this is to support people in learning the structure and practices that I use to help people solve a conflict. After this educational period, I would like a couple of these people to stick around and work together with me on a daily basis towards a shared dream.
I got the idea to start a 10-week course to share what I’ve discovered with people who have a desire to solve conflicts in themselves AND to help others to solve conflicts.
What I used to do when I got ideas for a new project, was just offer it and wait for people to come. Sometimes this worked, oftentimes this didn’t work.
This time I wanted to work with the principle to only do things I have support for. So first I did a survey on Facebook to ask what people wanted me to do next. I gave them three options I was excited about.
The 10-week course got the most votes, so I knew that what I was longing for, was also something some people were longing for.
2. Work with money in a more wholesome way
But then the issue arose: how am I going to get enough financial support while also making the course freely accessible. I want to give my work away freely, because I have seen the conflicts that arise from the mainstream way of going about money and I want to offer a more wholesome alternative.
Then I got the idea of starting a crowdfunding campaign.
This way people who want the course to happen can make it happen, which already gives me a sense of togetherness. And – if I get enough support to be able to focus most of my energy on this course – the people who are eventually taking the course, don’t need to pay anything for it.
I love this way of working.
This line from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail comes to mind:
“Nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.“