New "Patron" tier; patreon overhaul

Hi everyone. As you know, this Patreon page is no longer supporting just my (Colin's) work, but is funding the creation of something we are calling "The Mimbres School." So I've renamed the page and changed the URL: patreon.com/mimbresschool

This has been a big year of growth for the School since I finished my dissertation last December and have been working on this project full time. I'll be doing a full video report about the School's activities and finances early next year. We've added an enormous amount of content to the archive and we intend to continue at this pace for the foreseeable future. So there will be somewhere between 6-8 courses being offered and recorded every year.

Interest in the School and its activities has been growing, and I think that we have achieved "proof of concept." We've had something happening at the Mimbres School nearly every weekend since the beginning of the year. There is a lot of energy not only in our live classes, but also from the viewers of the archive, who message me often to express their enthusiasm. We're really doing this thing. So it's time to think about trying to raise some more money, so that we can do the thing even better.

Our basic tier is the $7/mo subscription. Nothing will change about this level of subscription: it will still get you full access to the archive of courses on Study Garden. This is an extremely reasonable price for what you get and I'm proud of that. It's important to me that financial means should never be a barrier to participation in the School. But for some of our subscribers, that's a fairly trivial amount of money, and so I want to offer you the opportunity to level up your support for our project.

For $23/mo, you will now be able to sign up for the "Patron" level tier. For now, what this gets you is a special role on Discord that will give you access to a hidden channel (#venal-officers-club) where you will be able to access the recordings of the Happy/Office/Hours sessions. We will also use this channel as a place to do "first pass brainstorming" about the future of the School before we open up the discussion to the whole community. We might also throw in other kinds of silly and/or trivial perks as we think of them.

I want to emphasize that the "Patron" tier is NOT "worth the money." What you get for signing up for this is in no way a substantial upgrade over the $7 subscription. Rather, it's intended for people who want to express their appreciation and support of the school and who feel that they have already been getting far more than their money's worth for $7/mo.

With the additional revenues, I will be funding continued development of the Study Garden site, as well as using it to bring in other instructors to broaden the range of discussion happening at the Mimbres School. Although teaching for the School is (so far) "just a gig," it pays its instructors far better on an hour-by-hour basis than official academia, and I'd like to see that number continue to go up. I also need to get a little more money for myself in order to make it possible to continue full time as the organizer of the school, and I also want to be able to bring Jade onboard as a full co-organizer of the project. I have full confidence that this is going to happen and that Mimbres School is going to continue to flourish and prosper.  So please, if you appreciate what we've done so far, please consider levelling up your subscription to help us grow new and better scholarly institutions.

See below for the recording of the first Happy/Office/Hours session, which we held this Wednesday. Thanks so much to everyone who came out. In this session, we discuss in a little more detail some of our plans for spending your money. In future sessions, we hope to hear more from students who have been auditing the classes on the archive, and discussing any sorts of topics of interest to our students.

We'll be holding this session EVERY Wednesday from 5:30pm to 7:30pm New Mexico time. You do NOT have be a "Patron" in order to attend the sessions, but only "Patrons" will be able to access the recordings. Again, this will be available in the #venal-officers-club on Discord (https://discord.gg/5AnGZUU8qX)

YOUTUBE LINK:
https://youtu.be/u5ihpJAbLrE

Again, thanks to all our supporters. We are going to bring you great things in 2023. And please consider telling your friends about the project, inviting them to Discord and... above all... encourage them to sign up for our classes! Spring 2023 classes will be taking signups soon, stay tuned.

- Colin

(EDIT: Here are instructions on how to upgrade your subscription level:

Editing your membership – Help Centre (patreon.com)