Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
HRP Status Update: 2022
11 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, co-founders of Human Restoration Project Nick Covington & Chris McNutt detail the impact of the organization in 2022, our plans for 2023, and how we're envisioning the future of our work in reimagining education. Detailed within includes...
- How HRP grew this year and the impact we've made
- Our goals for 2023, including a new pay-as-you-want learning series
- An update on our existing initiatives
- What we're doing with social media
- And how we're looking to speculative fiction for inspiration in our branding (e.g. solarpunk)
Plus, it's Giving Tuesday! We're running a funding drive through the end of 2022. If you appreciate this podcast (or any of our free resources), we would love your support! Visit https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/support to learn more (and score some donor gifts)!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Project Overview
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to our end of year status update podcast.
00:00:15
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:21
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Stacy Cadence Hilgenberg, Shawn Michael Morris and Josefina Maria Isabel Rodriguez-Sotres.
00:00:34
Speaker
among many awesome donors in our recent funding drive.
00:00:37
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:38
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Post, Twitter, TikTok, and more.
00:00:48
Speaker
So I'm joined by Chris McNutt, our executive director here today to talk about a year in review for 2022, kind of what we have going ahead in 2023, how our donor drive that we're in the midst of here through the end of the year is going to help us get there.
00:01:04
Speaker
And then talk about in the later half of this episode, some social media and some branding updates.
00:01:10
Speaker
So Chris, how are you doing today?
00:01:11
Speaker
I'm doing well.
00:01:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about all this stuff and talk about what we've been doing and where we're going in the future.
2022 Achievements
00:01:17
Speaker
Do you want to get us started then on that impact report?
00:01:19
Speaker
What are we, what were we up to in 2022?
00:01:21
Speaker
Well, run the numbers for us.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a lot of very intriguing and awesome stats that we've had as an organization.
00:01:29
Speaker
As many folks know, this is our first year that we've been full-time since about June of this year, so really only a half year.
00:01:34
Speaker
And I feel like we've done a lot of joyful work, things that have actually made an impact in schools across the country and perhaps even across the world.
00:01:42
Speaker
And we've seen a lot of growth just anecdotally in concepts like in grading, restorative justice, purpose-finding, that I feel like really
00:01:50
Speaker
weren't at play within the education sphere even just a few years ago.
00:01:54
Speaker
So stats wise, since January of this year, up until October, which is when we ran the report, we had roughly 1.4 million social media impressions.
00:02:05
Speaker
In terms of like year to date, we've had 54% more website users, 84% more page views, 40% more podcast listens.
00:02:09
Speaker
Our stuff gets about 4,000 reads per month.
00:02:16
Speaker
In terms of our articles, we have 500 resource downloads a month, 2000 average episode listens per podcast.
00:02:23
Speaker
So some awesome stats there versus where we have been in the past.
00:02:27
Speaker
Folks have been reaching out to us and saying a lot of just really heartwarming things about the work that we've been doing.
00:02:33
Speaker
And yeah, I'm pretty darn proud of it.
00:02:35
Speaker
We've had so many new writings.
00:02:37
Speaker
We've had 22 new stories from 16 contributors.
00:02:41
Speaker
We've had 23 new podcasts.
00:02:44
Speaker
Our research database is up to, I believe it's more than this now, but 534 entries, most of which are open access.
00:02:51
Speaker
Had six major releases.
00:02:53
Speaker
We had our ungrading handbook was updated and doubled in size.
00:02:56
Speaker
We had our kind of like new YouTube content coming out that's pretty high quality.
00:03:00
Speaker
In terms of that documentary, we just released a new YouTube video actually coming out as a recording today, as well as we had our zine, we had our interdisciplinary school subject, which is done, but releasing next year.
00:03:12
Speaker
Just a whole host of things.
00:03:14
Speaker
Finally, I'll talk about our conference and PD.
Conferences and Workshops
00:03:17
Speaker
So both through online workshops and working in schools directly, we've had
00:03:22
Speaker
398 educators attend our PD and workshops.
00:03:25
Speaker
98% said the PD was great or excellent, which I don't think is normal.
00:03:29
Speaker
So we must be doing something right there.
00:03:30
Speaker
And then our conference that we just kicked off this year had 125 attendees and 72% rated the virtual conference better than an equivalent in-person event.
00:03:42
Speaker
So we feel like our virtual model did quite well, and we plan on continuing that here this year.
00:03:47
Speaker
That's just really a small fraction of what we've been up to this year.
00:03:50
Speaker
I wrote this in the introduction to our impact report, but I think our Midwestern roots make us not want to be very frank with how positive our success has been.
00:04:01
Speaker
But we've been doing a lot of really cool stuff, and I'm very proud of the work that we've done as an organization.
00:04:06
Speaker
One of the last things that we did, Chris, was pilot the first in this edgy futurism learning series.
00:04:12
Speaker
So we put together a short one hour workshop with a pretty dedicated, you know, small group of people on our discord where we went through one of the aspects of our video game and learning design conference presentation that we had built both for the Progressive Education Network Conference, the Teacher Powered Schools Conference and delivered in person, you know, over 90 minutes in both of those contexts.
00:04:34
Speaker
And still,
00:04:36
Speaker
weren't able to dive in as deep as we wanted to.
00:04:38
Speaker
So we just took a slice of that, which was designing for emotion and in the space of an hour walked through a few activities with the people in the room.
00:04:47
Speaker
And the feedback was overwhelmingly positive on there, right?
00:04:50
Speaker
Despite our small but powerful group, like the message seemed to resonate and land and people seemed to make that transfer into their own classroom practice.
00:04:58
Speaker
So as we start to talk about the donor drive that we had just launched,
00:05:03
Speaker
prior to the past holiday.
00:05:05
Speaker
Let's go ahead and bring that in here because one of the things that we want to do in the future heading into 2023 is actually sustain this edgy futurism learning series with a whole host of other guests designing workshops, planning activities amongst our own content materials here too.
00:05:26
Speaker
Do you want to talk about the vision for that edgy futurism learning series?
00:05:29
Speaker
And we'll get into how the drive is going to support
EduFuturism Learning Series Goals
00:05:32
Speaker
that.
00:05:32
Speaker
The goal of the EduFuturism Learning Series is to build online professional development workshops for teachers that are interactive and that actually take advantage of virtual-first learning models as well as progressive education.
00:05:46
Speaker
We found, and we're not perfect at this either, we've done this in the past, that a lot of online workshops tend to be hour-long listening sessions with some chance for Q&A.
00:05:55
Speaker
The goal of the EduFuturism learning series is to tackle interesting concepts in interactive ways.
00:06:02
Speaker
In our most recent learning series pilot, you'll find that we use Figma and we had folks interacting and kind of manipulating charts and diagrams.
00:06:09
Speaker
And these are things that you could use in your own classroom or within a PD coaching context.
00:06:15
Speaker
The goal is to actually do actionable progressive education instead of just talking about theory.
00:06:20
Speaker
Theory is important, but it's not everything.
00:06:22
Speaker
So,
00:06:23
Speaker
The three different proposed learning series as part of this pilot are learning through video games, which is, as Nick just said, something that we've already done or just elaborating and building on that.
00:06:34
Speaker
For example, getting in like indie game developers to talk about their process and doing interactive activities with them, which would be super cool.
00:06:40
Speaker
The second is transforming and reflecting on societal change using science fiction.
00:06:46
Speaker
As we'll get into here in the branding part, Nick and I have been very much focused on the ideas of solar punk and cyberpunk and Afrofuturism and all these different interesting movements in the science fiction space and how those could be in accordance with social justice.
00:07:00
Speaker
So bringing in science fiction to the classroom, what does that mean?
00:07:03
Speaker
How does that change how we look at different ideas?
00:07:06
Speaker
And then finally, using and problematizing social media in classroom spaces.
00:07:12
Speaker
So still kind of really in that futuristic mode of thinking, how do concepts of
00:07:18
Speaker
Everything from tech talk to AI intelligence to the growth of even like far right movements on social media spaces.
00:07:25
Speaker
How do all those different things interact within our classroom spaces?
00:07:29
Speaker
This is not a series on like, here's how you control phones in class, or here's how you can do PBL with cell phones.
00:07:36
Speaker
I feel like those things have been done to death.
00:07:38
Speaker
This is more about like,
00:07:39
Speaker
How do I talk about Andrew Tate in my class?
00:07:42
Speaker
Because that's something that many middle school and high school, especially boys, are connecting with sadly right now.
00:07:47
Speaker
Or who even is that if you don't know?
00:07:48
Speaker
Because you probably should.
00:07:50
Speaker
Or how can I utilize AI writing?
00:07:53
Speaker
And how do we discuss that as a tool versus plagiarism versus cheating?
00:07:56
Speaker
What does that conversation look like?
00:07:58
Speaker
How can it be useful?
00:07:59
Speaker
So to summarize, the goal of this entire thing is to look at concepts that are kind of cutting edge or innovative and interesting while drawing upon theory, practice, and the history of progressive education.
Importance of Donations
00:08:12
Speaker
If you want to be able to support us through this drive, you can go to humanrestorationproject.org support.
00:08:18
Speaker
And there you'll actually find our little progress bar on what we think is a very fair amount of $2,500 to kind of kickstart the process for this.
00:08:27
Speaker
We're a little bit over halfway there now with 37 donors that we've got.
00:08:30
Speaker
Currently, you can find a quick trailer that we put together for that EduFuturism Learning series and kind of see
00:08:36
Speaker
more of the stuff that Chris was talking about.
00:08:38
Speaker
But we've also planned a few really cool, we think are really cool, donor rewards and gifts that you can get depending on your donation level.
00:08:46
Speaker
So a $50 donation actually gets you a limited edition The Future Needs You shirt.
00:08:52
Speaker
$100 donation will get you a limited edition 11 by 17 HRP poster that you could put in your classroom, you could put up in your office, you can put it up in your home.
00:09:01
Speaker
And then $150 donation will actually get you the early, early bird conference tickets for the Conference to Restore Humanity slated for July 2023.
00:09:12
Speaker
in addition to all the other things.
00:09:13
Speaker
So the $150 donation actually will get you the conference ticket and the poster and the shirt.
00:09:19
Speaker
The $100 donation will get you the poster and the shirt.
00:09:22
Speaker
And of course, any amount, you know, if you feel like you can't give up to that $50 amount, any amount counts towards the fundraiser, contributes towards keeping the mission of this organization alive.
00:09:32
Speaker
So check out our website, humanrestorationproject.org slash support.
00:09:36
Speaker
to learn more about our fall end of year fundraiser and more ways to get involved with the Human Restoration Project.
00:09:43
Speaker
And keep in mind too that your donation not only supports new initiatives, but initiatives we've done in the past.
00:09:49
Speaker
All of our work is primarily creative comments, unless we're drawing upon someone else's stuff that isn't.
00:09:55
Speaker
So that means that you can take all of our stuff.
00:09:57
Speaker
It will always be available for free.
00:09:58
Speaker
You can remix it.
00:09:59
Speaker
You can use it.
00:10:00
Speaker
The podcast, the resources, et cetera, are all freely available to use and they'll remain as such.
00:10:04
Speaker
So we'll all the upcoming events.
00:10:06
Speaker
Finally, I should note this tax season, we are an official 501c3.
00:10:10
Speaker
So everything is tax deductible.
00:10:13
Speaker
You'll get a receipt and you can utilize that if that matters to you.
00:10:16
Speaker
In addition to the Edgy Futurism
Plans for 2023
00:10:18
Speaker
series, which we're going to be launching in 2023, let's talk about the grant updates.
00:10:23
Speaker
Let's talk about professional development.
00:10:25
Speaker
Let's talk about the other big objectives that we have for 2023 as well.
00:10:29
Speaker
Do you want to get that started, Chris?
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:32
Speaker
So to be brief, our goals in 2023 are to release at least two to three brand new resources, as well as expand our PD outreach and then host our kind of second annual conference.
00:10:44
Speaker
In terms of PD outreach, we're looking to work with a variety of new schools, many of which are kind of in negotiation phase and or are in contract.
00:10:53
Speaker
So you'll see HRP working with various different schools.
00:10:55
Speaker
You'll see soon more information about our conference.
00:10:59
Speaker
We're still nailing down who exactly those keynotes will be and what the tracks will be.
00:11:02
Speaker
But I think they'll be very interesting and neat.
00:11:05
Speaker
I'm very excited for the potential there of some things we've been talking about and planning and learning from our conference last year.
00:11:11
Speaker
Finally, we are working on our Sharing with Power with Students handbook.
00:11:14
Speaker
That is our upcoming resource that will release early 2023.
00:11:18
Speaker
However, we've been delaying in releasing that because we are in active grant funding negotiations surrounding it.
00:11:24
Speaker
In the event that it is grant funded, it will be much bigger than what is already being prepared and it might come out a little bit later.
00:11:32
Speaker
The reason why that resource has to come out this year is because of those grant funding conversations.
00:11:36
Speaker
But I think we'll be all of us will be very excited about when it comes out and you'll see previews of that really soon.
00:11:41
Speaker
Join us after a quick break for a conversation on our response to the changing landscape of social media and how we're leaning into solar punk in 2023.
00:11:51
Speaker
Hey, it's Human Restoration Project's end of year funding drive.
00:11:55
Speaker
We're building an ongoing space for informing, guiding, and growing the progressive education movement.
00:12:00
Speaker
A home for educators, young people, students, families, activists, and scholars to fight back against the test-centric, rigid, and dehumanizing classrooms that are ill-equipped to tackle the challenges we face today.
00:12:10
Speaker
We are connecting together to build a broad social movement toward reimagining education because we all deserve a better future.
00:12:17
Speaker
This funding drive aims to maintain what we already do, as well as launch a whole new initiative called the EduFuturism Learning Series, a pay-what-you-want bi-weekly live web series featuring interactive lessons on emerging content in progressive education.
00:12:31
Speaker
Starting in January, we'll roll out three of these series.
00:12:34
Speaker
Video game design as learning design, understanding how designers build spaces that foster engagement and immersion,
00:12:39
Speaker
Reflecting on science fiction toward educational transformation, reflecting how we can utilize speculative fiction to reimagine a better future and fight for just causes, and utilizing and problematizing social media, navigating a community's use of apps, and finding how we can live with these tools toward a pro-social community in and out of the classroom.
00:12:58
Speaker
Your support means the world does.
00:13:00
Speaker
Every donation makes a huge difference in what we can offer as an organization and gives us the fuel to work with additional partners.
00:13:06
Speaker
$50 donors will receive this awesome limited edition color shirt.
00:13:09
Speaker
$100 donors will receive an exclusive limited edition HRP poster for their classroom or office.
00:13:14
Speaker
And $150 donors will receive an early, early bird ticket to Conference to Restore Humanity 2023.
00:13:19
Speaker
HRP is a 501c3 organization, and your support is tax deductible.
00:13:24
Speaker
We greatly appreciate your support, and if possible, please help us out and share this video far and wide.
00:13:29
Speaker
Thank you.
00:13:32
Speaker
Let's see if we can get through this without mentioning the new owner of Twitter in particular.
Social Media Strategy Shift
00:13:38
Speaker
But if you haven't noticed, there have been a lot of changes on that platform that have influenced a lot of the ways in which Chris and I are using our own personal social media on the platform, but then have also contributed to
00:13:52
Speaker
reflections and conversations about our organizational use of that platform to promote new works, drive engagement, et cetera, heading into this new post to Twitter world.
00:14:04
Speaker
And I say post ironically because that kind of has become one of our options that we'll talk about here as well.
00:14:10
Speaker
Did you want to add to that too at all, Chris, about what in that landscape kind of has changed and how have we been responsive to those changes?
00:14:18
Speaker
As folks know, Twitter is our primary social media platform as of right now.
00:14:24
Speaker
That's where we have the vast majority of our followers and where we engage with a variety of our content.
00:14:28
Speaker
We're also still on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and all those different spaces.
00:14:32
Speaker
And as an organization, we've been exploring, you know, where else do we want to be?
00:14:36
Speaker
If you don't follow us on TikTok, we've been pretty active on TikTok and pretty happy with it.
00:14:40
Speaker
As someone that doesn't understand TikTok at all, we've been doing, I think, quite well there.
00:14:44
Speaker
Same.
00:14:45
Speaker
We're also exploring other social media platforms.
00:14:48
Speaker
We're on Mastodon.
00:14:49
Speaker
I know a lot of folks are exploring that.
00:14:50
Speaker
And we're also looking at places like Hive and Tribal and all the other different spaces that are popping up, as well as Reddit, as ways that we can reach as broad of an audience as possible.
00:15:02
Speaker
The reason why we're having this conversation about Twitter is because algorithmically we're concerned with one, how our own reach is doing there in the new landscape of that area, but also just the kind of animosity towards movements of social justice towards folks that are doing this type of work.
00:15:18
Speaker
And we don't necessarily know if we want that to be our primary space of engagement.
00:15:22
Speaker
Do know though,
00:15:23
Speaker
We're not leaving Twitter.
00:15:24
Speaker
We'll continue to post on Twitter.
00:15:26
Speaker
It's just where we're shaping our primary engagement as an org.
00:15:30
Speaker
So the gist should just be social media is kind of in a state of upheaval with people exploring a post-Twitter world.
00:15:37
Speaker
We are not leaving Twitter, but we're going to shift our primary home base of social media operations, perhaps away from Twitter into the future and towards some of these alternatives.
00:15:47
Speaker
The primary one right now being on post.
00:15:49
Speaker
So if you search for that as a platform, you go to at Humor as pro, you'd be able to connect to us.
00:15:54
Speaker
I'm still at Covington edu and Chris is at the way you TBD because he's still on the wait list, but that's fine.
00:16:03
Speaker
So we've kind of leaned into and read a lot of work in the last six months around solar punk and sort of its offshoots and its rebranding as part of an offshoot of speculative fiction.
Rebranding with Solar Punk Aesthetics
00:16:16
Speaker
So Chris, do you want to talk about what that rebranding has looked like for us and what people can expect in the future?
00:16:22
Speaker
Folks that are familiar with HRP's aesthetic and vibe probably know that we lean into a science fiction aesthetic.
00:16:30
Speaker
And a lot of our work has drawn upon pulp science fiction, like things like Isaac Asimov, that kind of stuff, in terms of space age thinking.
00:16:39
Speaker
So we would draw a lot upon, I guess, symbolism that would be akin to everything from dystopian sci-fi, like 1984, to 1950s, like iRobot, 1960s, whatever that was.
00:16:53
Speaker
So the idea of solar punk is taking the narratives of that old school, the world is ending, we need to fix things, robots rose up, we need to fix our dystopia,
00:17:06
Speaker
If that's the old way of thinking, solar punk is about imagining a future where utopias do exist.
00:17:12
Speaker
Typically, they're under threat of someone trying to tear that utopia down.
00:17:18
Speaker
But in a solar punk reality, people have learned to...
00:17:21
Speaker
work within nature.
00:17:22
Speaker
They have come together and built a better future.
00:17:26
Speaker
They're usually diversely populated.
00:17:28
Speaker
They fix the environment, which is a big part, obviously, of solar punk.
00:17:31
Speaker
And people in general live in harmony.
00:17:34
Speaker
It views people as a natural good who will solve their problems down the road, as opposed to something like altered carbon, which would view people as a natural evil, where capitalism has destroyed the entire world, and now people are trying to survive.
00:17:48
Speaker
So we're leaning into this aesthetic of solar pump because we want to build that future of hope.
00:17:53
Speaker
We want to build what would be called a pragmatic utopia, right?
00:17:57
Speaker
It's not wondrous thinking where we think that the world is just going to be solved by thinking about a better future, but it's taking steps to actually make that utopia a reality.
00:18:07
Speaker
It's about being interesting and inspiring.
00:18:09
Speaker
It's about making change at a grassroots level.
00:18:12
Speaker
And it's also about recognizing that
00:18:14
Speaker
Those future possibilities of what school could be already exist.
00:18:19
Speaker
We speak to schools all the time.
00:18:20
Speaker
You can listen on our most recent showcase series was with One Stone.
00:18:25
Speaker
It's a nonprofit where at least a majority stake of the board has to be students.
00:18:30
Speaker
And young people are actively involved in shaping that school.
00:18:33
Speaker
They operate the school.
00:18:35
Speaker
And kids in general, they're a happy community.
00:18:39
Speaker
So
00:18:39
Speaker
They've built a space that works for them, that's imagined a different reality, and they've done it.
00:18:45
Speaker
So these ideas that public education is doomed or that we need to have a revolution or that the world sucks and look at how terrible everything is, we don't necessarily think that's a prolonged needed conversation because we've seen that a different possibility exists.
00:19:00
Speaker
So we're trying to rebrand and focus a little bit more on this almost edupunk style of building something new together that is full of hope and reimagination.
00:19:09
Speaker
In terms of what that looks like, be on the lookout for even more articles on actually implementing these ideas.
00:19:15
Speaker
We're not removing any of the theory and we'll still acknowledge all the bad things that exist, but we're going to lean a lot into how can we actually change things and make that tangible as well as the actual like artwork and look of HRP.
00:19:27
Speaker
If you haven't been to our website recently, definitely check out our new website design, which is a little bit cleaner and leans a little more into that aesthetic.
00:19:34
Speaker
as well as new artwork that's on the way, which is inspired by like children's books and that imagination you would have had when you were seven, eight or nine years old about a bright tomorrow and a better future.
00:19:45
Speaker
So yeah, definitely check that out.
00:19:47
Speaker
So in summary, the idea of the solar punk or Afrofuturism or just more positive future that we're building together, it's to recognize that future possibilities are already here.
00:19:58
Speaker
We just need to unlock those ideas at scale.
00:20:02
Speaker
So if you want to support the Edgy Futurism series, if you want to support the leaning into this solar punk future together, you can go ahead and go to humanrestorationproject.org support.
00:20:14
Speaker
You can contribute to our funding drive.
00:20:17
Speaker
If it's possible for you to give, we appreciate it.
00:20:19
Speaker
But if not, we appreciate you sharing the video or our content as always.
00:20:24
Speaker
Thank you, Chris, for joining us today.
00:20:26
Speaker
And let's restore humanity together.
00:20:29
Speaker
Thanks again for listening.
00:20:31
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project, find ways to get involved, share our work, and donate to keep the project going on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:20:41
Speaker
And of course, you can find us everywhere on social media by searching for Human Restoration Project.
00:20:46
Speaker
And let's restore humanity together.