Words From The Director’s Loft These last few months have been intense! With the departure of Jax, our operations director, Earthdance was urgently needing staff support to keep the wheels turning. After a long and intricate courtship, I’m very excited to share that this support has been arriving over the past two months. As of this month, we now have three additional staff members and sweet humans living on-site full time. Melanie Christine Warner is our new Program Coordinator and is bringing her NYC connections and professional background to help strengthen and diversify both our own programming, and our rental clients. Olive Frank has started as our new Site Coordinator and will be managing our re-flourishing Work-Exchange program (we currently have three lovely WEXers on site) and holding down all site related issues from code compliance, beautifying Earthdance spaces and managing onsite registrations. As well, we have Brett Roche who has agreed to become our new residential Chef with a strong wish to improve our food sustainability and strengthen our connections to local producers while providing delicious organic meals for our events when possible. And finally, Christos Galanis will be working part-time remotely, assisting with programming and marketing. In my mind Earthdance’s USP (marketing lingo for a Unique Selling Proposition) is that it is your home. This feeling that people get when they walk into our door comes from the fact that it is an actual home. Earthdance was founded as an intentional community and while those folks moved on over time, I believe it is exactly the fact that it is carried by a residential community that gives us our unique flavor. Reestablishing this onsite presence, after COVID and internal struggles had left only Victor and Izzy, our cat, onsite was something I was striving for since I started last December. Finding skilled individuals who care about Earthdance and our land and were willing to leave behind their lives and move here wasn’t easy. That this is now happening and that even more people have expressed interest to move on-site gives me confidence that together with this growing community, we can make Earthdance thrive again. |
