Today is one year and thirteen days from the first blog post on this site. At the time, I was fairly reliably employed and looking forward to enough of a bonus at project completion to provide a little seed funding for a small conference in addition to other financial needs.
Since then, that job (and my finances) imploded. I have since regained some employment stability, but the fiscal damage is far from healed. I’m working a second part-time job and keeping my eyes peeled for a better one in order to pay down debts from the layoff.
First, the bad news:
Barring a substantial monetary windfall, I can’t afford even the bare minimum deposits and operating expenses for a tiny, hotel-based conference.
Running a really kickass (but tiny) conference, with a sponsored keynote speaker (airfare, hotel, & meals), a hospitality suite, advertising, and so on could easily have run $5,000 or more. Even without those, the room costs and taxes would’ve been about $1,500 (for up to 75 people), plus another $500 or so for things like programs, badges, and other unexpected incidentals. That’s around $2,000, mostly upfront- even if admission fees could cover it on the backend.
Second, some good news:
If I dump the entire idea of attracting people from around the country/world and move to a small venue that isn’t a hotel, I can probably reduce the upfront costs significantly.
Third, some ambivalent news:
Cutting back to a purely local conference also means a reduction in content and chances to meet new and interesting people from far away. This decreases the perceived value of the conference, which means that any admission fee would have to be much smaller. That would limit the ability to carry funds forward to the next year.
That said, I am still investigating this possibility in the hopes of doing something in early 2020 with the goal of building on that towards a proper conference the following year.
Fourth, for something completely different:
Hearthingstone was first and foremost about creating professional development opportunities for polytheist leaders to help them improve their skills for serving The Gods, their communities, and their traditions.
Increasingly over the last year, the fractious and scattered state of our polytheistic communities has been a topic of discussion amongst said leaders. There is a swelling impulse to draw the faithful closer together. As I wrote last fall:
From a practical standpoint… it’s much easier to start a successful business, become a “mover-and-shaker”, find a date, or even just a decent job if the people around you know you and have common cause with you. It’s also easier to build a temple.
To that end, I am adding a “Polytheist Villages Network” page to this site and also a discussion group on Facebook. I’m not entirely sure what this will evolve to be, but my goal is to help foster intentional communities for polytheists in the form of neighborhoods or similar forms of geographic proximity and common cause.
As there are any number of important considerations regarding where people live and why, I think this will be an interesting topic for some polytheist leaders, especially those directly involved in serving groups of the faithful. That said, I think it could be a potentially valuable resource for monastics and mystics as well, who (like many of us) often struggle to find needed support services.
I hope you will join us in this endeavor, and at whatever sort of conference I can pull together.
-In Deos Confidimus
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