I Cannot Believe How Fast This Has Moved

I cannot believe how fast this has moved.

Eighteen people have pledged $3,750 toward the $5,500 I need to open the doors. That is sixty-eight per cent of the way there, in nine days, and I am still catching up to what that means.

I want to tell you a few of the actual pledges, because the numbers do not carry it on their own.

A woman in Australia wrote to say she is pledging from the middle of a burnout, and that my words have been soothing, educating, and anchoring her while she is down under going through it. Someone in Germany asked, carefully and in her second language, whether I could add a translation button, because crossing the language border to reach my writing is the first access barrier she meets, before any other. A reader mentioned a friend who studied with Nora Bateson and offered to pass this along to an organisation that does not specialise in neurodiversity but, in his words, surely encounters it constantly in their work anyway. A decades-long facilitator and therapist pledged at the practitioner tier, openly excited to see what I am building. A photographer marked a hard year of trying to get her business off the ground by choosing, in her words, to mark the shift by becoming a founding member.

None of these people know each other. They found this from different directions — an essay, a friend, a search, a recommendation — and they all landed on the same page and said yes to something that, as more than one of them said outright, they are still working out how to fully describe.

What this actually tells me

I built this whole campaign on the assumption that I would have to persuade people slowly. State the number, show the receipts, explain the milestones, wait.

The persuading has mostly already happened. Not by this campaign — by two years of essays, by the courses sitting finished on a static site, by people reading something that named their own experience back to them accurately for the first time. The campaign did not create the trust. It just gave the trust somewhere to go.

That is not a boast. It is closer to a correction, and an uncomfortable one, because it means I underestimated how many of you were already sure before I asked.

The date, and why the two-for-one stays open

The campaign runs through 30 September. That has not changed, and I want to be plain about why: rushing the remaining thirty-two per cent would mean taking money from people who have not had time to actually decide, and I would rather have this take longer and be real.

The second seat stays open through that same date. Every pledge, at either tier, still carries a founding year to give away — to a friend, to someone who cannot pay, or back to me to place as a scholarship. That has not changed either, and if we reach the goal early, the pledges keep the same terms until the 30th regardless.

If we raise more than the number

Here is something I had not planned to say yet, and I am saying it now because it is true and because you deserve to know what your money would actually buy if this keeps moving the way it has been.

$5,500 gets the backend built. That is the whole ask, and it is the only thing this campaign is contractually for.

Anything raised beyond that number does not sit in an account waiting for a use. It goes toward the accessibility work I have wanted to do since before I had a business plan and could not fit into this budget: translation into other languages, so the language border a reader in Germany named to me does not have to be crossed before anything else can happen. Video production, for the people whose processing works better in a voice and a face than in text on a page — which is a real access need, not a nice-to-have.

I am not asking for that money separately, and I am not adding a stretch-goal ladder with rewards at each tier. I am telling you honestly what happens to a dollar that arrives after the 5,500th one, because you should be able to decide what you are funding with full information.

Still eighteen people short of the whole thing

Thirty-seven founding members gets the doors open. We are at eighteen.

If you have been meaning to and have not yet, or you know one person this would genuinely reach, that is still the most useful thing anyone can do right now.

One more thing, while I have you

The accessibility commitment I have written about before is now live on the site itself — not a policy page bolted on, but linked in the footer of every page: Access is a practice, not a badge. It says plainly what the site does and does not yet do, and it will keep being corrected in public as I learn where it falls short.

Where it stands

Eighteen of thirty-seven founding pledges. $3,750 of $5,500. Nothing has been charged — pledges are authorised, not taken — and the campaign runs through 30 September.

The founding campaign, with the full pitch →

— Sher