31.01.24 update

We did it!! Or rather, you did it: as a result of the pledges and donations you made, we not only reached our target, guaranteeing that we'll be able to hire the support we need, but surpassed it by several hundred pounds - thereby allowing us to maintain this support for longer. Thank you so much! It really is so wonderful to know that you believe in the need for a wilder world just as much as we do, and to have the certainty that we'll definitely be able to expand the team this year. We can’t wait to share more soon!

M&E
x

INTRODUCTION

Welcome, friends! We’re Maddy and Eleanor, and we’re so glad you’ve found your way here to The Wild Academy, home of guided learning journeys designed to help you untame, unfurl, and unearth the wild within. You can read more about who we are and what we do here.

We launched the academy (originally as Folk + Field) in the autumn of 2019 with pretty much nothing but our imaginations. No savings, no investment, no sponsorship or advertising…just two friends with wild hearts and a dream of reclaiming ‘human nature’ as an ecocentric perspective deeply rooted in the wisdom of the land, seas and skies. A perspective that honours cyclical experience and animal instinct, and restores seasonal flow to the daily rhythms of life and work.

We began with a membership community that has developed over the years into what is now The Grove, and a twelve-month course that has become our flagship programme, Rewild Your Work. Alongside these offerings, these days we also run a nature-led co-working group (The Wild Work Collective), a training for fellow wildhearted space-holders (The Rooted Practitioner), an immersive exploration of wild identity (Untamed), a community for nature-inspired wordsmiths (Wild Writers), and more besides. We send out free lunar letters to our treasured subscribers twice a month at the new and full moon, and share weekly conversations on seasonal topics through our podcast, Wildheart.

Throughout the past four years of evolution and expansion, we’ve done everything ourselves. We committed early on to growing the business in a slow, organic way that meant we’d be able to establish a cycle of funding our progress by re-investing a portion of our profits, whilst also paying ourselves a wage. We’ll be honest: this has always been low compared to the hours we work, but we’re proud to say it’s increased year on year and is now much more viable as a sustainable source of income. However, the reality is that we both make significant financial sacrifices in order to run the academy in line with our values, and - no matter how fiercely passionate we feel about doing this work - there’s a limit to how long we can continue in this way. We’re so excited by the growth we’ve seen over the past year in particular, but we’ve reached the point where we can no longer do it all alone…so we’re asking for your help.

From 31st October until 6th December, we ran the first phase of our independent crowdfunding campaign to fund the next phase of The Wild Academy’s journey and raised over £2,000. After a midwinter pause, we’re ready for the second phase, raising funds to grow our team so we can continue to expand our offerings and our reach whilst maintaining both the soul of the business and the high level of heart-centred support and engagement we strive to provide. If you’ve ever felt held in kinship through one of our communities, experienced transformative learning through one of our courses or workshops, or felt seen and understood by something we’ve shared online, we warmly invite you to consider supporting us as we navigate these next steps. As the more-than-human world continually reminds us: it’s better to do things collectively than in isolation, and together we can accomplish so much more. Day by day, the tide is turning and things are changing for the better. With your help, we can continue to play our part in the reawakening and reclaiming of the wild within us all.

PRACTICAL VISION

As is so often the case in life and work, especially for those who are self employed, our main struggle during this phase of expansion is being stretched too thinly; having a wide range of focus areas, and not enough time to give our full attention to them all. Currently we manage our own admin and marketing alongside creating and running our offerings, and, although we’re doing all these things successfully, we know that - with the right support - we could do them even better. We’re also aware that the academy would flourish more fully if we could dedicate more of our time to pursuing the research, learning and embodied practices that inform our approach: the more sources of inspiration we can draw on when bringing to life new programmes and experiences, the deeper and richer they will be as spaces for growth.

With this in mind, what we’d most like to do is to create two new part-time roles within The Wild Academy team: a Community Weaver to oversee communications with our students and members, and a Marketing Magician to help us share our work more widely. Both would be offered for an initial period of six months with the aim of extending this, at first to a full year, and then potentially longer term if that were to become feasible. Our hope is that, within the first six to twelve months of having this additional support, we would see enough of an impact to make the idea of permanently growing The Wild Academy team a reality.

funding goal: £4,000

This would cover:

• The production and postage of the physical items being offered as rewards as part of the crowdfunding campaign

• Living wage employment of both a Community Weaver and Marketing Magician on a part-time, freelance basis of 16 hours per month for 6 months.

stretch funding

Anything raised in addition to the initial goal would contribute towards:

• An additional 6 months’ support from both the Community Weaver and Marketing Magician on the same terms

• The purchasing of recording equipment to improve the audio quality of our podcast