Help Druidawn Expand!
Donation protected
Hello Druidawn Fans!
We did it! We just acquired a 501c3 nonprofit status for our scholarship program, Druidawn Academy! Anyone who donated funds to our program in the year 2018 or later can now claim it as a tax deduction and we can give you a receipt for your donation.
Thank you all again for the amazing support you have provided our services over the years! Thank you for your wonderful testimonials and generous donations!!
Over the past couple of years since we began this GoFundMe project, we have re-examined our long-term goals and have decided to change our focus for now. Though everything listed below still applies, what has become more important for us to focus on in the meantime is our scholarship fund, Druidawn Academy. Yes, we still need funding in order to find and train new teachers and to ultimately create a permanent base of operations, but we also need your help to support students who can't afford our services on their own. We are very driven to find students of low income who have great imaginations and whose needs are not being fully met in the public school system. We don't want Druidawn to be reserved for just the privileged.
We have always offered our own scholarships to children in need (for writing clubs as well as summer camps), but it would be great to be able to do this by pulling money from a reserve scholarship fund rather than from our own meager income.
So from this point on, the first $20,000 we raise will go exclusively to help pay for students who cannot otherwise afford our services. It will also go toward helping us find and train the qualified teachers to serve them. As soon as we build up a bit more funding, we'll send out advertisements for scholarships in low income communities. We're excited to have a chance to work with these invisible children who need our services the most!
___________________________________________________________
OLD POSTING:
Thank you all so much for helping Druidawn to grow so quickly! It’s incredibly gratifying to know that over the past 25 years, our unique creative writing system has encouraged thousands of reluctant students to overcome their anxiety and become productive, even enthusiastic young writers! We now have a long wait list of students who wish to enroll in our services who have sadly been waiting months for us to train new teachers. It really is time for us to take the next steps toward Druidawn expansion. We need to search for talented teachers who can learn to do what we do. We need to realize our long-term dream and create Druidawn Academy at last - a non-profit permanent home for our popular Summer Fantasy Camp as well as a place that offers all kinds of interactive enrichment classes, such as Druidawn creative writing, live-action history, interpretive reading, and hands-on science. And ultimately, we need to create a mobile unit that can take our summer camps and in-person writing clubs to schools all over the United States. Yes, we dream big, but you never know what is actually possible if you don’t have big dreams!
We can’t do any of these things without your help. We, (Miriam and Cara), have maxed-out our schedules working with writing clubs and private clients, and without some financial backing, we will be unable to take the next steps toward expanding Druidawn. We realize that we will need to move into supervisory positions as we hire more teachers because we will be responsible for training and watching over these new people, but don’t worry, we won’t be abandoning any of our own students in the process. We’ll make this work as long as possible. But we do have to face the fact that we won’t be able to keep up our current pace forever, and when it finally does come time for us to step into supervisory positions full time, we’ll need to have amazing teachers in place who can carry on our work!
Our Plan for Expansion:
Phase 1: ($20,000 Goal)
We find and train new teachers. For this we’ll need:
· An office that we can use as a training facility
· An advertising budget so we can get the word out
· A travel budget so we can fly teachers in from other states for training
· Compensation funds so we can pay our new teachers while they train
Phase 2: ($200,000 Goal)
We find investors who want to help us build our Non-Profit Druidawn Academy! For this we’ll need:
· A building large enough to support at least six classrooms as well as the most amazing indoor and outdoor LARPing playground anyone has ever seen, complete with a castle, a pirate ship, a forest, and mountains to climb! (LARP = Live Action Role Playing, like what we do with swords outside during summer camp)
· An advertising budget
· An administrative staff
· Seed money to help us get our first two years off the ground until the center can fully sustain itself
Phase 3: ($150,000 Goal)
We create a mobile unit to travel to schools all over the country. For this we’ll need:
· 2 or 3 minivans
· A travel budget
· An advertising and insurance budget
· Trained teachers who we can trust to do it right!
We want to take things step-by-step, so for now, we’re just trying to raise funds for Phase 1 of our project. Of course we’re always open to speaking with investors who might be interested in helping us to build Phases 2 and 3, but we can’t begin to plan for those parts until we find teachers, which is an arduous task all on its own! Our teachers need to have a background in working with students with unique learning needs. They need to be reliable, mature and have excellent classroom management skills. They need to have great imaginations and a passion for the fantasy/science fiction genre as well as be capable fiction writers themselves. They need to be outgoing and entertaining, creative and playful, and they need to have some experience with role playing games. It is also important that they have a good rapport with parents. Lastly, we’re only interested in finding teachers who are in a position to guarantee that they won’t abandon our students in just a year’s time, because as you all know, our kids get rather attached! LOL! Yes, it’s a very tall order to fill, which is why we need to look nationwide for just the right people.
For those of you who are new to Druidawn, where have you been? Just kidding! Welcome aboard this amazing journey. Please check out our website to learn more about us and what we do: www.creative-writing-solutions.com. Druidawn is a creative writing system that utilizes the magic of fantasy role playing as a tool to get kids excited to write. Even our most reluctant writers who struggle with dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger Syndrome and other barriers respond incredibly well to the Druidawn writing system. All they need to have is a good imagination and an ability to talk (or communicate by some other means). The system is designed to excite the imagination and to reward the writing process in a way that most kids can relate to.
We also offer private tutoring services to help students with mechanics such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, ideas, organization, expression, and other written skills, since we only cover the subject of writing content during our clubs and interactive summer camps. Fiction writing “content” includes subjects such as character development, dialogue structure, description, setting, symbolism, plot development, etc. Please see our long list of testimonials from parents to better understand how our writing system affects students.
We work with students all over the United States as well as other countries such as France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and England who participate in our very successful online creative writing clubs. We use Skype video conferencing in order to reach your children from home no matter where you live! Our Druidawn Summer Fantasy Camp is currently held at Mackintosh Academy in Boulder, Colorado (mackintoshacademy. com), but if all goes well with our future plans, we will one day be able to bring our summer camp to your area! We have already received numerous invitations to bring our camp to Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and North Carolina and have had to turn everyone down because we just don’t have the staff! With your help, we could change this problem and begin to finally say “YES!”
We did it! We just acquired a 501c3 nonprofit status for our scholarship program, Druidawn Academy! Anyone who donated funds to our program in the year 2018 or later can now claim it as a tax deduction and we can give you a receipt for your donation.
Thank you all again for the amazing support you have provided our services over the years! Thank you for your wonderful testimonials and generous donations!!
Over the past couple of years since we began this GoFundMe project, we have re-examined our long-term goals and have decided to change our focus for now. Though everything listed below still applies, what has become more important for us to focus on in the meantime is our scholarship fund, Druidawn Academy. Yes, we still need funding in order to find and train new teachers and to ultimately create a permanent base of operations, but we also need your help to support students who can't afford our services on their own. We are very driven to find students of low income who have great imaginations and whose needs are not being fully met in the public school system. We don't want Druidawn to be reserved for just the privileged.
We have always offered our own scholarships to children in need (for writing clubs as well as summer camps), but it would be great to be able to do this by pulling money from a reserve scholarship fund rather than from our own meager income.
So from this point on, the first $20,000 we raise will go exclusively to help pay for students who cannot otherwise afford our services. It will also go toward helping us find and train the qualified teachers to serve them. As soon as we build up a bit more funding, we'll send out advertisements for scholarships in low income communities. We're excited to have a chance to work with these invisible children who need our services the most!
___________________________________________________________
OLD POSTING:
Thank you all so much for helping Druidawn to grow so quickly! It’s incredibly gratifying to know that over the past 25 years, our unique creative writing system has encouraged thousands of reluctant students to overcome their anxiety and become productive, even enthusiastic young writers! We now have a long wait list of students who wish to enroll in our services who have sadly been waiting months for us to train new teachers. It really is time for us to take the next steps toward Druidawn expansion. We need to search for talented teachers who can learn to do what we do. We need to realize our long-term dream and create Druidawn Academy at last - a non-profit permanent home for our popular Summer Fantasy Camp as well as a place that offers all kinds of interactive enrichment classes, such as Druidawn creative writing, live-action history, interpretive reading, and hands-on science. And ultimately, we need to create a mobile unit that can take our summer camps and in-person writing clubs to schools all over the United States. Yes, we dream big, but you never know what is actually possible if you don’t have big dreams!
We can’t do any of these things without your help. We, (Miriam and Cara), have maxed-out our schedules working with writing clubs and private clients, and without some financial backing, we will be unable to take the next steps toward expanding Druidawn. We realize that we will need to move into supervisory positions as we hire more teachers because we will be responsible for training and watching over these new people, but don’t worry, we won’t be abandoning any of our own students in the process. We’ll make this work as long as possible. But we do have to face the fact that we won’t be able to keep up our current pace forever, and when it finally does come time for us to step into supervisory positions full time, we’ll need to have amazing teachers in place who can carry on our work!
Our Plan for Expansion:
Phase 1: ($20,000 Goal)
We find and train new teachers. For this we’ll need:
· An office that we can use as a training facility
· An advertising budget so we can get the word out
· A travel budget so we can fly teachers in from other states for training
· Compensation funds so we can pay our new teachers while they train
Phase 2: ($200,000 Goal)
We find investors who want to help us build our Non-Profit Druidawn Academy! For this we’ll need:
· A building large enough to support at least six classrooms as well as the most amazing indoor and outdoor LARPing playground anyone has ever seen, complete with a castle, a pirate ship, a forest, and mountains to climb! (LARP = Live Action Role Playing, like what we do with swords outside during summer camp)
· An advertising budget
· An administrative staff
· Seed money to help us get our first two years off the ground until the center can fully sustain itself
Phase 3: ($150,000 Goal)
We create a mobile unit to travel to schools all over the country. For this we’ll need:
· 2 or 3 minivans
· A travel budget
· An advertising and insurance budget
· Trained teachers who we can trust to do it right!
We want to take things step-by-step, so for now, we’re just trying to raise funds for Phase 1 of our project. Of course we’re always open to speaking with investors who might be interested in helping us to build Phases 2 and 3, but we can’t begin to plan for those parts until we find teachers, which is an arduous task all on its own! Our teachers need to have a background in working with students with unique learning needs. They need to be reliable, mature and have excellent classroom management skills. They need to have great imaginations and a passion for the fantasy/science fiction genre as well as be capable fiction writers themselves. They need to be outgoing and entertaining, creative and playful, and they need to have some experience with role playing games. It is also important that they have a good rapport with parents. Lastly, we’re only interested in finding teachers who are in a position to guarantee that they won’t abandon our students in just a year’s time, because as you all know, our kids get rather attached! LOL! Yes, it’s a very tall order to fill, which is why we need to look nationwide for just the right people.
For those of you who are new to Druidawn, where have you been? Just kidding! Welcome aboard this amazing journey. Please check out our website to learn more about us and what we do: www.creative-writing-solutions.com. Druidawn is a creative writing system that utilizes the magic of fantasy role playing as a tool to get kids excited to write. Even our most reluctant writers who struggle with dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger Syndrome and other barriers respond incredibly well to the Druidawn writing system. All they need to have is a good imagination and an ability to talk (or communicate by some other means). The system is designed to excite the imagination and to reward the writing process in a way that most kids can relate to.
We also offer private tutoring services to help students with mechanics such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, ideas, organization, expression, and other written skills, since we only cover the subject of writing content during our clubs and interactive summer camps. Fiction writing “content” includes subjects such as character development, dialogue structure, description, setting, symbolism, plot development, etc. Please see our long list of testimonials from parents to better understand how our writing system affects students.
We work with students all over the United States as well as other countries such as France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and England who participate in our very successful online creative writing clubs. We use Skype video conferencing in order to reach your children from home no matter where you live! Our Druidawn Summer Fantasy Camp is currently held at Mackintosh Academy in Boulder, Colorado (mackintoshacademy. com), but if all goes well with our future plans, we will one day be able to bring our summer camp to your area! We have already received numerous invitations to bring our camp to Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and North Carolina and have had to turn everyone down because we just don’t have the staff! With your help, we could change this problem and begin to finally say “YES!”
Organizer
Miriam Darnell
Organizer
Longmont, CO