Why we ask for your donations
It’s a question any organization or project ought to be able to answer clearly and with ease. “We are doing good work here. We need your support. This is why…”
[No time to read this? You can go right to the donor page!]
Right now, we are working to raise funds because we are in need of them in order to continue – but more than continue, we want to expand, to increase our outreach and program capacity, to move out in some new and exciting directions. The times are simply calling for this and we want to be able to respond effectively and with a little dose of inspiration and encouragement for the challenges ahead.
And they are many. We write before each new post, Fostering Ecological Hope. That is no small task given the tremendous stresses on the natural world that evolved us, holds us, nurtures us with such generosity. Yet despite those stresses (and no small amount of actual destruction and abuse), early in May a dozen or so of us gathered in the cool spring breezes, under the trees and the late afternoon sun in a public park, to spend a couple of hours in silent contemplation and shared reflection. It was a glorious afternoon.
What I mean is this: despite the abuse, despite the damage, there is still so much beauty, still such enchantment within this planet in which we live and move and have our being. And we don’t want to lose that. In fact, we know the human will die spiritually as well as biologically if we lose that.
We’ve been gathering once a month since the year began, forming a little core community for what we call, Centering for New Creation, a little play on the name of our sponsoring non-profit organization. It is healing and renewing for all of us, a time to quiet the craziness of our times and just – stop. The deep listening leads to some extraordinary wisdom and insight shared out of the silence.
In that space we foster ecological hope.
Or on Good Friday, speaking to 140 teenage boys, along with faculty and staff, at St. Lawrence Seminary High School in Mt. Calvary WI – their rapt attention as I presented with photos and graphs the state of our earth and made the case for scaling down our whole consumer culture in order for life as we know it to survive, their magnificent questions and thoughtful responses.
More ecological hope.
Or introducing the film, Journey of the Universe, at an Earth Week event at Edgewood College in Madison and facilitating a discussion on the new cosmology and the ecological crisis, and seeing the dedication and deep commitment of so many activists, students, teachers, and more.
One of the best parts of my work is this opportunity to engage people from so many walks of life, multi-generational gatherings, good decent people wrestling with what it means to be alive at this moment in time when most everything seems to be in transition and not always in a good way.
Why do we ask for your donations? For the work that includes:
1) ongoing research and study of our ecological challenges and the ways in which different communities are trying to meet those challenges, creating the new way of life as the old one based on the industrial growth model crumbles all around us, or crumbles our earth all around us;
2) ongoing work on presentations, workshops, and retreat days so that each one is geared towards the group that has invited me, to match my contribution to their searches, questions, and needs – I don’t have just one standard presentation given over and over again, but try to make these programs as relevant and inclusive of questions and dialogue as possible within each unique community;
3) supporting this website, including the writing of essays “On Meaning and Culture” at least once or twice a week – one of our dreams right now is to raise funds to support a revamping and enhancement of our website to make it more user-friendly, more participative, and inclusive of the larger community with which we collaborate;
4) acting as a point of gathering in the Milwaukee area among those who are inspired by and committed to a new vision for humanity within this planet inspired by the work of new cosmologists, deep ecologists, and various faith traditions, the first step being our Centering for New Creation group;
5) collaborating with other groups and networks in Milwaukee and beyond to help build the connections that are vital to the creation of the ‘new way of life,’ or, echoing the words of Thomas Berry, creating a mutually enhancing relationship between the human and the rest of creation to replace the destructive mode in which we now live.
Examples of this collaboration include: working on the program committee for the biannual conference of Sisters of Earth planned for this July at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana; collaborating each year with the Peace & International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee on their annual March lecture series, always a success; participating in a sustainability education collaborative that gave birth in Wisconsin but has participants from other parts of the country, now in the process of rethinking and re-creation into the Abundance Collaborative.
Now we do all this work with almost no staff (I work as a consultant to move the project along) and no overhead (most of the work is done out of my little flat). Our budget is small at the moment (we can do a tremendous amount of work for $60,000-$75,000 per year), which means that every contribution makes a real difference, no matter its size.
One of our dreams right now is to build our capacity for outreach. Throughout the Midwest, and the whole country for that matter, are small, vibrant eco-spirituality and eco-education projects, many of them founded by Catholic religious women, and all of them giving evidence of the new life springing up amidst the wreckage of the old ‘paradigm.’ We don’t have a center like that in Milwaukee, but the city could use one – if not a physical center, then at least a point of coordination that could connect with these other communities.
We want to be one of the spiders in those spider webs building the connections, or a weaver among weavers, part of the ecological community that is earth’s response to a time of growing peril. We hope our work can have regional resonance; but we also hope that it can have culture-wide implications and impacts around the country.
Big ambitions for a small operation, so we are inviting you to help make us less small, to help us grow our capacity to build the new community of ecological hope.
Our country is in real upheaval. The competing visions for the future of this nation could not be more stark, a sign of what is at stake as well as of the magnitude of the evolutionary changes underway. How will we do as we approach multiple tipping points – energy demands and population growth, global warming and climate change, reaching the limits of industrial growth leading to vast damage to our oceans and rivers, forests and farmlands, our ability to feed ourselves or have enough water for all the creatures that need it?
The western industrial model of growth is reaching a crisis point even as the demands of the human world are increasing dramatically, and will throughout this century. How will we live through such a time? What earth will we pass on to the next generations? Or, as some have put it so eloquently, what kind of ancestors will we be?
So we ask for your support. Know that your donations will go to enhance this one unique expression of earth’s need for solidarity from one of its most troubled species, but still a species full of potential, a species from which the earth invites a deeper, more intimate friendship as we seek our way through the crisis to the new way of life.
So for whatever you can offer at this time, I thank you!
Margaret Swedish
Photos credit: Margaret Swedish
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