Hi everyone,
The last three months have been a wild ride. While I'm not ready to share a LOT of details to anonymous people online just yet, what I can share is that an opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap and after much consideration, I decided to take it.
I'll be focusing my efforts this year away from online spaces and toward in-person community cultivation in my little rural city in California.
This space (lawsonry.com) will archive my writing for a while, and then eventually go offline sometime in the future. Your subscriptions will remain for as long as you want to support the work I am doing, which I'll share a bit about below:
- Young Americans (K-12+) want and need in-person communities (i.e., third spaces)
- Without safe third-spaces, young Americans seek belonging in online groups
- Online groups are an attack vector for propagandists (e.g., technofascists)
- If I want to make a measurable, positive difference in the world I'm handing off to my children, I need to cultivate community in and around me physically
Many of you have supported me as I oscillated between different ideas. Thank you for your belief and support in my perspective and the things I have wanted to put out into this world. My focus now is going to be in-person community cultivation and bringing a new feeling of belonging to those in my struggling community. This is, I think, the best way out of the mess we find ourselves in.
You're welcome to keep subscribing; you're also welcome to stop. Going forward, 100% of any money donated to me funds our K-12 after school tutoring and literacy programs. I'll share more material as we get it printed, but in short, one of the things we provide is sliding-scale after school clubs and week-long "camps" for kids to work collaboratively on building literacy, teamwork, and confidence. All our work is mapped to the California educational outcomes that public schools develop curriculum through, and just in our experiments locally we are seeing radical positive changes in students who otherwise would not have access to these kinds of spaces and opportunities.
I hope to share more as we start getting material funded and approved. We'll be working with our local schools as partners along with different businesses that help provide the kind of spaces we are providing.
Singing off, I want to say:
- I appreciate you support up to this point
- I welcome your continued support but understand if you'd like to stop now
- I hope we can all take a break from social media to focus on cultivating community in and around us
With love for everyone,
-Jesse