We’re close. So agonizingly close to finishing Nature Labs and helping a new generation develop the tools required to balance the needs of people and nature.

But we’re struggling. Hugely.

You might remember our last couple of updates and the litany of personal apocalypses we’ve faced: Our grizzly bear main character dying on day four of production; a serious car crash; our apartment catching fire and flooding and losing heat and hot water in winter…

And then Jill got sick. Long COVID, 10 months of hospital visits, and still a long road ahead.

And then Simon got sick. A serious neurological disorder.

And then Simon’s dad suffered a massive heart attack last week and has a very long hill to climb in recovery. And Jill has her own family health crisis she’s battling, that’s equally overwhelming.

We’re still trying to get ourselves healthy and now we must do everything we can to help our parents through hell.

That’s on us.

But under the weight of all that, we’re struggling to keep up with our 15 hours/day, 7 days/week work schedule to complete Nature Labs for the start of the next school year.

To be honest, it was going to be a struggle to keep up this pace for nine more months in this five-year odyssey. Now it seems downright overwhelming.

We need your help to keep grinding.

How you can help:

1.     Help us raise $25,000. There are many ways to raise money, but few avenues that don’t inflame today’s political divides and the requirements of all school districts. We rely on the kindness of individuals to support us through donations, print sales and access to exclusive content through our Patreon community.

Why $25,000?

–       We need to upgrade our hard drives to smooth our editing process and back-up what we’re producing (we wish the cloud was an option, but it’s not);

–       We need to pay for significant server space to upload our content and renew a dozen software subscriptions to get us to the finish line;

–       And we need to maintain our workspace: We can’t afford to renew our lease in our two-bedroom apartment, but we need all of our living room and second bedroom space for filming and post-production – and we can’t afford the time delays of a third move in less than 15 months.

2.    Copy editing. We’ve written a lot for Nature Labs. Well over a million words. And everything needs editing – from overlooked typos to a human eye reviewing AI-generated quote transcriptions (from our interviews) in our produced written content. Help with copy editing frees us up to focus on our bigger video editing and web development tasks.

We can finish Nature Labs and provide students with a foundation of nature literacy for all that they do.

We can balance the perspectives of left and right, urban and rural, east and west through a storytelling-driven platform.

We can meet the diverse curricula requirements of 13 different jurisdictions while connecting ever-evolving current events to community realities.

We can do all of this – we can do it in written, video and audio form for different learning styles and at broadcast level quality – and we can do it without million-dollar budgets, Silicon-style development teams or big foundation and corporation support.

But we can’t do this alone.

With your help though? We can and will do it, together.

Simon & Jill

PS

Breaking news! Our car was just broken into while helping Simon’s dad in the hospital! There are significantly worse problems in the world today, we know. Still, some days, it does feel like being punched in the face repeatedly.