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Community Campaign Kick-Off

Happy solstice, friends!

Today at 8:39 a.m. Alaska time, our planet’s axis, which at this moment in Earth history is tilted about 23.5 degrees relative to its orbital plane, was tipped maximally towards the sun, as if bowing in deference to our life-giving star.  For most of our readers (all you denizens of the northern hemisphere), that makes this the first day of summer and also the longest day of the year – 18 hours and 41 minutes out at the Inian Islands.  Even those remaining 5-plus hours are plenty bright for a stroll or a paddle, and we won’t see stars or aurora until the darkness returns.  The biosphere is dazzling this day: iris and lupine are in bloom, the sea is cloudy green with phytoplankton, the rufous hummingbirds and humpback whales have arrived and so have the salmon. And so have the students, yogis, and friends from nearby communities.  It’s been a busy spring at Inian Islands Institute, hosting a course from Earlham College, a volunteer work party, and a yoga retreat back-to-back-to-back.  Each event will get its own blog post in the next couple of months, with some wild photos and video, so stay tuned – for now I’ll just say that all were smashingly successful.

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Throughout the community campaign, this king salmon will show our progress towards $50,000. Winter kings can be caught just offshore at the Hobbit Hole.

We picked this day, with all its cosmic significance, as the official start of our “community campaign!”  Even as we continue seeking out visionary major donors who can help us purchase the Hobbit Hole property and establish our program, it’s crucially, wonderfully important to rally the community for smaller donations as well.  The sheer number of donors to Inian Islands Institute (over 100 and counting!) helps demonstrate that we have a strong, loving, supportive community of people aligned behind this project.  That wide base of community support is the foundation on which we’re building this dream, and from which we reach out to the major donors.

Our community campaign goal? $50,000 before winter solstice.

So with that – it’s kick-off time! This community campaign should be damn fun; our first event will be the July 4th parade in my hometown of Gustavus, Alaska, followed later on by a concert with a local Gustavus bluegrass band, and other good times.  I’m also headed out “on tour,” speaking about Inian Islands Institute in the communities of Southeast Alaska and up-and-down the west coast — starting with a slideshow presentation at the Gustavus library this Friday, June 26.

We encourage you to join us in this wild ride! Your donation is tax-deductible, un-replaceable, and feel-goodable.  Here’s the page for our community campaign, where our king salmon progress bar will be ticking upward.  Let’s fill in that king salmon together, and build this institute for experiential education, ecological research, and for our community.

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