Why Pledge? 5 Reasons to Support Nature Play’s Agile Learning Community
With three days left to support our campaign and everything to play for, it’s decision time, folks.
We know most people will make the decision to pledge based on emotion rather than logic. So, let’s start with a picture of my beautiful wife Emily and our three year old son Seth—who, not coincidentally, stands to be a leading beneficiary of Nature Play bearing fruit over the coming years. This is the “why” of this campaign. It is, truly and simply, one more piece in the puzzle of co-making a better world for the people we love.
Next — just in case you need a little extra persuading — here’s 5 good reasons to become a founding supporter of Nature Play’s Agile Learning Community today.
#1 We’re almost 75% Funded
We’re already 25 days into our 28 day campaign, and the good news is we’re almost over line — just £395 still to go!
Typically 30–40% of a crowdfunding target will be raised in the last 3 days of a campaign, so we’re actually still on track despite the predictions outlined above.
Our average pledge is £28, which means we only need 14 more supporters to tilt this campaign over our all-or-nothing target. The big question is — “could you be one of these heroic 14 backers by making a pledge today?”
#2 We’ve Got Match Funding
Awesome alert — one generous supporter has already pledged to match every single £1 we raise over this whole campaign. This is incredible, and game-changing for Nature Play’s Agile Learning Community.
So let’s get clear on how this works. Our campaign is all-or-nothing, which means we need to hit our target of £1,500 or we get nothing at all. And if we do hit our target —which is just 14 average pledges away — we get every single £1 match funded.
This additional gift — equivalent to 3 months full time salary in Greece today — will help us to build all-important momentum by engaging local children and parents in a regular offering on Evia Island. See #5 below for more information.
#3 We’re Seeding a European Agile Learning Network
Our intention for ALF Summer Europe is simple — “Let’s invite innovative educators from all over Europe to converge on a Greek island paradise, and see what magic unfolds.”
This is now really happening. The training is fully booked, and we’ve got budding Agile Learning Facilitators coming to play with us from all over Europe — including the UK, Belgium, Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia and, of course, Greece.
Our vision for a European Agile Learning Network is radically open. It goes something like — “Let’s hold a space open for 9 days of co-creation, where we can learn from the exponential success of Agile Learning Centres in the US, and be inspired by the potential for seeding something similar — or different — here in Europe.”
We’ll do our best to capture this co-creative journey on film and in blogs like this one, in order to make our emerging network as accessible as possible to the successive waves of Agile Learning enthusiasts we hope our activity will inspire. And we’ll invest time and energy into the building of digital resources, too. All this and more is made possible by this crowdfunding campaign so please, do it now. Make your pledge today and become part of something emergent and diverse, purposeful and messy — just like real life.
And just in case you’re still wondering “what on Earth is Agile Learning” — here’s our lead facilitator Bear with an informative and heartfelt explainer.
#4 We’re Disrupting the Educational Paradigm in Greece
Alternative schooling is illegal in Greece. Like, a mom recently lost custody — and was subsequently given a prison sentence — for home-schooling her kid.
We believe that Agile Learning can be a useful tool in disrupting the educational paradigm in Greece by identifying it as a complement to school, and thereby opening up new spaces in which creativity and experimentation can flourish. Rather than compete with the status quo on highly sensitive territory, we will offer everything else besides the standard model. Because in a world as topsy turvy as today’s, agility really is our super power.
Working in this way, we hope local children and parents will be engaged in a gradual, “taste and see” kind of process. And more than this, we intend to play to our strengths — because yes, Greece is Europe’s most biodiverse country and has more coastline than the rest of the continent combined — by building a diverse offering of summer camps, youth clubs, weekend pop-ups, internships and other co-learning journeys around the specific needs and offerings of world-schoolers and un-schoolers from across the world. We therefore seek to embrace education as tourism, adopting a multi-sector approach which might even help to cross-subsidise our model and improve accessibility for local children and parents.
#5 We’re Planting a Nature Play Agile Learning Community on Evia Island
This Agile Learning Facilitators training is our ground zero. It’s all-important to lay solid foundations like these, but it is also only our first step.
Next up, we’re planning to invest this campaign’s match funding into a six month pre-school trial in collaboration with our good friends and Nature Play co-founders Stagones eco camp and Paliomilos permaculture farm. This will be a great opportunity to engage local children and parents, getting to know all about their unique needs and offers, so that we might begin in earnest to design with them, instead of only for them.
Even beyond this, we’ve also begun scheming around the kind of collaborative architecture we need to build to help identify Evia Island as a leading destination for Agile Learners of all ages in the years to come. You can get an early impression of how Nature Play might build bridges with other, like-minded initiatives here by diving into Transform Evia’s recent call to action.
For all of these ideas, what’s important to grasp is simply that this island region is a rich and fertile soil, in which we might now begin in earnest to build and plant the better world our hearts know is possible. So let’s make this campaign the start of something — a tiny acorn, if you like, from which a mighty oak can grow.
Thanks everyone. And please, one last time — Pledge and Share!
Since permanently relocating with my young family almost a whole year ago, we’ve got involved in all kinds of community building over here on Evia Island — from the co-founding of ENA Assembly to the startup of Origin Club, a collaborative trade platform and network for Central Greece, and now Nature Play, too.
We’ve realised that crowdfunding is an important tool when used to raise seed funds — but more than this, crowdfunding is an essential tool when used to grow a crowd. Sure, it’s an emotional rollercoaster ride but, honestly, in our experience there’s nothing quite like a 28 day campaign to bring a community together.
Thanks for supporting us again, folks. One last heave — then let’s get deeply immersed in the massive and transformative work of catalysing something extraordinary on Evia Island this July 28th — August 5th.
The magic (and mayhem) of co-creation is that we never really know what will happen next. But there is one thing you can rely on — we will keep you posted… :)
Got questions?
Please email Marcus on marcusjohnletts@gmail.com
