Dear Friends, Readers, Listeners, Visitors, and Supporters:

I’ve always wanted to do more with the College of Mythic Cartography, ever since I had the vision of a jar of seed that would inspire a flowering of storytelling and cultural roundtables of folks bringing back the “ancient fresh ways” that marked our (for most of us) distant ancestors as wise sustaining villages, bands, and peoples.

I’ve already received much help from friends and contributers, and for that I thank you.

I believe strongly in the power of Open Source, collaboration and open access to ideas, experiments, and lessons learned.

Lately I’ve struggled with bringing the kind of attention and resources to the College that it needs to fully do this work. I know it needs more donations then I have so far received to keep it going, though honestly it doesn’t require much. And I can’t bring myself to “charge” for this cherished jar of seeds. That doesn’t seem in sync with the spirit of the College at all.

I truly believe that all of us stand in the first tremors of a great Rewilding Renaissance, and I dearly want to do my part and keep helping in the way that I know how. I also want to make sure that I create content that actually serves the needs and interests of supporters.

In that vein, I’ve recently come across a funding strategy that I plan to start experimenting with, using a website called Fundable.com. I think many small donations can make this whole endeavor fly, and I want to make sure that everything I create here actually has an audience that has declared their interest and expectation.

In Fundable’s words:

What is Fundable.com?

Fundable.com lets groups of people pool funds to raise money.

Each project has a description of how much money needs to be collected and what it will do. Once enough pledges (not payments) have been collected, Fundable turns them into real payments and sends the total to the project’s organizer.

No one takes a risk when making a pledge: if a collection expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges and never charges money. This lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. No one pays until and unless everyone else makes a pledge.

I’ll post a series of podcasts that I’d like to do, with a fundraising goal on each. We’ll start with this:

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Please donate to making this podcast possible. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Philosophy of Tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.