Introducing the Seeda School Seed Fund
Help Ayana build the first Seeda Schoolhouse in Dawn, Virginia.
By becoming a paid Substack subscriber you are helping Ayana build Seeda School, a study space for learning code through collective imagination and care.
The Seed Fund
The Seed Fund establishes a collective investment that will resource Ayana to transform a free standing garage (pictured above) on their family’s land in Dawn, VA into the first Seeda Schoolhouse.
Your monthly $5 will also fund:
The development of the first online Seeda School courses
The documentation of the Seeda School journey through the Soft, Where? Podcast
Seeda School’s overhead cost such as hourly wages, website, Adobe Creative Suite, online course recording software, wifi, etc.
Ayana’s research and writing practice on alternative modes of being
Ayana’s housing, transportation, and healthcare costs alongside a grocery budget supporting local farmers
How It Works
Invest.
Become a paid Substack subscriber to invest in the development of Seeda School. You will be investing in Ayana’s ability to develop curriculum, host workshops, and maintain their material needs.
Share.
After becoming a paid subscriber, please share the newsletter and seed fund with others. Sharing widely helps connect us with prospective students, investors, and collaborators.
Stay Tuned.
Now that you are subscribed to our newsletter you’ll learn about Seeda Press releases, upcoming workshops, online courses, study sessions, Ayana’s research, and more.
The Vision
Inspired by the ecosystem holding our work, Seeda School will grow slowly and with intention. The vision is to start with in-person workshops in Richmond, VA which will inform online course curriculum. Supported by income from online courses we will build a team to cultivate emergent classrooms in our web of local Richmond libraries. We will offer these learning opportunities and activations with the intention of building a schoolhouse in Dawn, VA to host transdisciplinary activities weaving ceramic, forest gardening, hair braiding, fiber practice, Black studies and more into coding curriculum.
Phase 001 — The Web
Seeda School will facilitate a series of in-person workshops in Richmond, Virginia to develop and co-create coding curriculum alongside participants. The lessons and collaborations that emerge from the workshops will be folded into a series of online courses that will help fund the next phase of Seeda School.
Phase 002 — The Network
The offering of a transdisciplinary online course catalog of Front-End Web Development, Back-End Web Development, Open Source Programming, and more will fund Seeda School’s collaborations with other artist teachers to begin multi-week learning activations utilizing Richmond public libraries as an ecosystem of networked classrooms. Seeda School will seed into our local public infrastructure and host long-form course offerings for students hoping to learn Full Stack Software Engineering for web study, networked ceremonies, and art practice play.
Phase 003 — The Land
The ultimate vision is Seeda School becoming an anti-disciplinary space of study where students can blend the possibilities in fiber, fiction, ceramics, permaculture, seed archives, coding, hair braiding, and more to explore multiple ways of knowing. The first Seeda Schoolhouse will be in a renovated free standing garage transformed into a laboratory in Dawn, VA on the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund.
Why Am I Building Seeda School?
After years of teaching web development inside schools and non-profits prioritizing career advancement and capital accumulation I am committed to orienting my teaching practice around a different set of questions such as:
What software and biotechnologies do we build when given space to imagine, play, and speculate outside the disciplinary enclosures of industrial demands?
What does the Black queer and trans imagination want to build with code, if anything at all?
How might teaching code through a lens of interspecies belonging and collective imagination help facilitate care work and care culture online and away from keyboard?
Why Am I Starting A Seed Fund?
I am most inspired by the projects funded by thousands of people making small contributions instead of a small amount of people making contributions in the thousands.
The three phases within the Seeda School vision are
Phase 001: Online Course Catalog
Phase 002: Team of Artist Teachers Facilitating Emergent Classrooms in an Ecosystem of Public Libraries
Phase 003: Seeda Schoolhouse in Dawn, VA
In order to build out Seeda School in the above phases we need seed funding.
I am unable to build this project out while maintaining a full-time job that will fund the vision. I have tried and it has made me ill on multiple occasions. This is not a side hustle this is a calling and it feels most aligned for it to be made possible through community care and resource re-distribution.
What Is The Timeline?
During the next 6 months of the seed fund campaign, July to December 2022, I will be facilitating transdisciplinary coding workshops in Richmond, VA and publishing a Seeda School newsletter weekly. The goal is to convene 1,000 paid Substack subscribers to this space by December 2022. At 1,000 paid subscribers contributing at least $5 a month by the end of 2022, we can start 2023 with a potential to gather $60,000 gross annualized revenue by the end of that year. With this potential in place I will start the development of the first online course in early 2023, putting in motion Phase 001 of the Seeda School vision.
GOAL → 1,000 Paid Substack Subscribers by December 2022
At the end of June we are currently at 11 paid subscribers to the Seeda School newsletter. I will send a progress report at the end of each month as we collectively walk this path toward ways of working, teaching, learning, and being that feel much more pleasurable and possible.
Please share this newsletter and consider becoming a paid subsciber if you’re able.
See you next week <3
With gratitude,
Ayana