There’s an old joke about a plane coming in for a landing. It descends smoothly onto a new air strip and there isn’t enough time to stop. It crashes into the terminal. After confirming that there were no injuries, the captain turns to the copilot and says, “What the hell? That was the shortest runway I’ve even seen!” The other pilot counters, “Yeah, but it sure was wide though.” It may not be the most comedic quip but it is an apt analogy regarding the state of our startup.
Healers, "Healers' Helpers" & Friends
Our mission is to expand the options of people feeling stuck in regard to healing. We've only been at this for a short while but we’re already impacting many lives with our free resources: our magazine, social media platform, and pilot events. Our magazine is already reaching more than 400 readers a day and our social media platform has more than 1,700 users. Despite the difference we're making today our future is uncertain at best due to financial resources or, in biz lingo, runway.
Engagement
Readership: Comparing 6 Months to 6 Months
In 2017 we put together a small team and were able to scrape together a shoestring budget with which to release what developers call a minimum viable product, a functioning prototype of our magazine and social network, a jury-rigged promise of all that is to come technologically. Once we had a working website we released the first issue of Healers Magazine and then watched readership escalate with each subsequent edition.
Issue 1 - Beyond Binaries: Healing without Borders
What's At Stake
For our social enterprise these are the best of times and also the worst of times. Let’s begin with the good news: magazine readership is growing almost 20% each month lately and email subscriptions are growing nearly 40% on a monthly basis—not too shabby right? We’ve also assembled over 400 artists and nearly 700 authors actively contributing to our magazine or intending to—a massive masthead by any measure. Still, something’s amiss. We’ve yet to earn significant revenue and are at risk of running out of money in the next 5 to 6 weeks, in which case we would have to stop helping people around the world, especially those of us who are/were underinformed and/or misinformed (as our founder was/is).
Issue 2 - Getting Personal: Digging Deep
But why does any of this matter? Let’s take a step back. Above and beyond modern medicine there is an enormous array of healing modalities, both ancient and new. Many of them were preeminent at one point but have been defamed by the institutions that dominated modernity and pushed globalization. The time has come for people to reconnect with ancient healing arts and to explore postmodern permutations. Healers is here to help bridge the gaps—e.g., ayurvedic healing in South Africa and psychotherapy in China—and fill the void. We also intend to elevate humanity by doing our part to heal the collective unconscious.
Issue 3 - Integrative Health: Complementary vs. Alternative Therapy
People far and wide need to be exposed to perspectives that differ from medically mainstream narratives because in many cases the forms of healing that they endorse aren’t working. There are pervasive pockets of (non-condescending) ignorance—certain populations whom have not been told about the majority of healing practices available to them. There are also many black holes: certain areas in which certain breeds of complementary and alternative healers are nowhere to be found. The urgency of our mission requires rapid growth and far-reaching expansion far beyond the scope of this campaign but first things first: in order to make good on our commitment to reach half a million readers in 2019 we need to renovate and also innovate.
Issue 4: Epistemological Equitability: The Democratization of Truth
Growing Pains
We’ve spent about $50,000 on the project and invested $100,000 in unpaid, sweat-equity labor since we started developing it. (It started simmering on the back burner in 2015 but didn't become our beloved, sole obsession, until 2018.) With the seed capital, which was granted to us by SEM Foundation, we’ve been able to reach a little less than 30,000 readers to date. This might sound impressive or it might not. Either way, it’s a drop in the bucket at best. The bucket is public health and it’s filled with hyperendemic disease and pandemic mental illness.
Issue 5 - Dialectical Dealings: Problems That Are Solutions
Our website is badass. We love it. The problem is that there are important aspects of it that are literally bad, but oh the places we’ll go if we get the support required in this moment of need! Most importantly, we’ll be able to repair the site’s social networking features, allowing healers and people interested in healing to engage and inform one another. (Why air your dirty laundry on Facebook—where it probably won't be well-received—when you could seek counsel from an online community that respects your situation, admires your candidness, and nurtures your healthful intentions?)
A Demo of the Website's Current Features
We’ll also be able to start hosting events (type 1, type 2), which will be perfected in Dubai, home to many healers, this summer and then syndicated worldwide by partnering facilitators. We’ll start printing our magazine, which will also be globally available. Online, we’ll increase the number of new articles we publish each week from 5 to 10. Likewise, we’ll increase the number of issues we publish each year from 6 to 12. Last but most, we will expand the program we just launched called Healing Gold that allows our stakeholders to earn credits that be redeemed for healing/therapy.
Introduction to Healing Gold
The Backstory
Where and when did all this begin? Our Executive Director, Benjamin Eisenstein, was in New York working for a psychology magazine in 2012. Within just 1 year he increased readership from 1,000 monthly readers to 100,000 and was promoted from intern to COO. He then implemented the magazine's first revenue stream by launching a sister website that featured a directory of alternative therapists, which broke even in only one month. During the ideation phase of the project he envisioned a site called Healers encompassing all healing modalities—not just “therapists”—and recognized the enormous importance and scalability of such a platform, which was at that time rejected. In a semi-stream-of-consciousness press release that Ben wrote to accompany this campaign you can read about the events between then and now, which are what inspired him to make Healers happen.
Ben Preparing to Film Our StartSomeGood Video in New Delhi
The Problem
We need to raise $3,333 in order to employ a talented coder here in India, full-time for 3 months and then part-time for 3 more months. The new web developer will patch up the holes in our hull, thereby saving our ship, allowing our community to sail smoothly into a better future—one in which its members have an abundance of options in regard to healing and healers. To review the list of web development updates that need to be made click here.Upcoming Website Updates: April, 2019
It might sound silly but we selectively chose a Wordpress theme, also known as a template, that was originally designed for fledgling dating sites. Why’d we do that? That would be because pairing patients and healing practitioners is an important form of what amounts to matchmaking; wanting to foster connections, the flirtatious social media features were what drew us to the particular template we singled out. Secondly, our events are vital to our mission and one of them was derived from speed dating. Also, the theme had a multi-author blog which is essential to our magazine. As you can see there was some logic to our decision, though it ended up being a less-than ideal one. We did our best but our talents lie in uniting authors, artists, healers and healees—not programming. It's been 2 years since our strategic partner, W3Villa, built our website and, because of the bugs and malware we've contracted since and the general shortcomings of the theme, it's time for a turnt-up tuneup.
Launch Day: May 24, 2017
The Solution
Whether or not you contribute to our campaign there are myriad ways in which you can get involved with Healers. Here are the complimentary options: subscribing to our newsletter and joining our social media platform. Here are the paid, crowdfunding options: subscribing to our print magazine, creating a professional account, getting listed in our healing directory, and advertising in our magazine. Here are the paying options: allowing us to share your writing, allowing us to share your artwork, helping us with administrative work and helping us with executive work. (Payments are made it the form of Healing Gold.) Oh, and if you know any talented PHP developers who are passionate about healing please send them our way! Finally, if there's anything you'd care to discuss you can email us at [email protected] or schedule a brief call with Ben here.