The Mindful Word on Indiegogo

The Mindful Word’s Indiegogo campaign

Last updated: March 25th, 2019

The Mindful Word is a collective of individuals committed to creating a culture of engaged living. The practice of mindfulness is the starting point for this cultural transition. Rather than exploring mindfulness in isolation, The Mindful Word aims to further integrate mindfulness in everyday life by exploring other aspects of engaged living such as the slow movement, permaculture and contemplative arts for the mindfulness characteristics they share.

The ever-changing nature of the world provides an opportunity for even the most negative seeds of war, injustice and environmental destruction to be transformed. However, our highly polarized society often does not allow for the open, compassionate dialogue necessary to transform these seeds. Rather than speaking out against others, The Mindful Word strives to speak out against injustice in an open, inclusive way. That has been part the vision of The Mindful Word, a non-profit publishing collective, since its launch in 2007.

We’ve grown recently and have come to a point of transition so we’re reaching out to you to help fund a new platform we’re creating for writers, editors and designers to express themselves while taking ownership in their work.

What we do

We publish a daily blog and a quarterly digital magazine. Both are freely accessible at www.themindfulword.org, and both are freely available for reprinting, copying, distribution and alteration under a Creative Commons license. The blog features content from a variety of topics in web-friendly format. The digital magazine is a different medium geared towards longer reads and features some of the top articles not found on the website. It captures the same benefits that print magazines provide with stunning spreads and eye-catching visuals. Designed with larger fonts to read easily on the screen it reads just like a paper magazine, but with the added features that digitization provides.

With attention spans shortening by the second, it’s easy to shout out sixty-second sound bites, but to state views on sensitive subjects without dividing and alienating people takes deep thought, patience and an awareness of the larger picture. Going against the current of shortform journalism, we want to continue providing thoughtful stories. But just as it takes effort to read these stories, it takes effort to write them with the necessary care and mindfulness.

4 reasons to give

1. Digital magazine – Our digital magazine is both ad-free and free to subscribe. We’d like to keep it that way, but since our subscriber list has grown we now have to pay to send emails out to our list. (if you haven’t already done so, sign up for a free subscription here).

2. Writing, editing and design – Though we’ve been operating using volunteer help until now, there’s a limit to the amount of time and effort that can be asked of volunteers, so to consistently provide readers with quality articles and to move forward with new developments, such as offering a moderated discussion forum, we need to pay our writers and editors for their contributions to the digital magazine and website as well as our designer, who has been faithfully creating layouts and images for each issue free of charge, for the last year.

3. Collective ownership – The Mindful Word was founded as a collective where anyone who has an interest can get involved and use the forum as a way to engage themselves and the world. We feel that writing is a fantastic medium for personal and collective transformation that supports a deepening of one’s own practice. To provide consistent, quality service to our readers while also moving forward with this vision of collaborative creativity, we’ve recently opened up ownership like a worker co-operative where contributors can take part in decisions and take ownership in their work. But to properly make this transition, we need start-up funding to provide contributors with some upfront payment for their work in addition to the revenue sharing they make as members of the collective, which is minimal when just starting out.

4. Events & charitable initiatives – In addition to publishing stories about living a mindful, engaged life, The Mindful Word has hosted events where people can gain hands-on experience doing the kind of things we write about. We’d like to do more of that because we feel that reading about something is just the starting point and experiential learning is where the deepest lessons are learned. The same goes for charitable initiatives, which we’re looking to undertake. But before doing so, we need to get the website and magazine operating sustainably.

Where the money goes

Our funding target is $8,000, which will encompass our design costs of $300 per issue, emailout costs of approximately $50 per issue and the rest going towards paying writers and editors. This amount is required to fund operations for this transition year, providing the necessary upfront payment to writers, editors and the designer, after which point the upfront payments will no longer be necessary because we expect the contributors will be funded wholly by revenue sharing.

If we do meet our target, donors will get an additional perk: pick the themes for our four digital magazine issues next year, and suggest particular story ideas you’d like to see featured in those issues!

If we don’t manage to raise $8,000, we won’t take the money and run—we’ll just have to lower the payments to our contributing writers and editors a bit. If we don’t meet the target, we also won’t be able to organize our issues according to specific themes.

Since a great deal of political and economic unrest exists in the world, it’s more important than ever to promote a culture of peace, tolerance and mindfulness. If you’re able to help us disseminate our ideas as widely and with as much impact as possible, we will be grateful for your support. You’ll be recognized for your contribution in our spring 2014 issue, on our website and our social media pages, if you so choose, and you’ll also receive a great gift based on your donation level.

If you like our vision, but you can’t afford to make a donation at this time, we understand! Sign up for a free subscription anyways and keep in touch. And if you can, please help us promote our project by sharing our campaign on your social networks. If you’re a writer or editor who would like to join us as a contributing member read this or if you’d like to just submit an article read our submission guidelines.

You can also join us on Facebook or Twitter using the links at the top of this page, and view our image gallery to see some of the picture quotes we have featured or will feature on Facebook in the near future.

VISIT OUR INDIEGOGO PAGE TO SEE OUR LIST OF GREAT PERKS AND TO MAKE A CONTRIBUTION>>

Any amount you give would be greatly appreciated!

thanks,

The Mindful Word

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