Open Letter: Thank You Charter Members & News

Dear Members,

We pray that you are healthy and happy, as we spin around the Wheel of the Year. It is always our hope that you are living with joy and an everlasting curiosity. We are curious folk, and we are always seeking to add
to our knowledge and share it with everyone around us. The Witch School thanks
you for making us part of your life.

Over the years, we have worked exceedingly hard to build an online school that
has relevance and value to our real lives, not just our virtual ones. We are
focused on bringing education to those of you who want it. We will be
celebrating our 10^th Academic Year in September.

We have had the help of extraordinary volunteers, a steady trickle of financial
resources, and have done a lot of hard work. In order to finance this project
in 2001, we decided to ask the community to help us. In a time when everyone
was using advertising to fund their websites, we asked our students to purchase
lifetime memberships. We sold subscriptions to the site, keeping a majority of
the site free to all comers. That was how we began to build out the site.

Our basic premise was that if we could get 10,000 people to agree with us for
the need for Witch School, and they would invest a small amount of money, then
we could build an incredible website. These people would represent the Charter
Members, the first people to believe in and accept what we could do together.
With their help, we built Witch School and are continuing to add new features
each year. It was that act of faith that brought us here. We are nearing that
milestone, and we will soon reach our goal of 10,000 Charter Members.

We started with an idea, and this evolved first into a daily email, then into a
website, and finally today it has become an Educational Platform. This was the
dream of our Charter Members. This is what their hope and their faith has built
- a life-long educational website.  Due
to the nature and the deep thriftiness of the Pagan community, we had to prove
ourselves each step of the way. In our development, where other organizations
spent dollars to build, we spent pennies. We very much did it ourselves,
against all odds, and today we have more than just a school, we have a global
community sharing an educational and socially interactive platform.

Where did Witch School come from? The information and early classes came from
the Correllian Tradition, and continues to be our primary focus. But the idea
of Witch School began with two people, who deeply influenced the founder Ed
Hubbard, to start the school.

In 1998, Brendan Tripp encouraged us to offer a Daily Horoscope Reading on the
Internet along with our radio show. Then we decided a Daily Spell was more
practical, and on November 11^th of that year, Don began sending out
his lessons. Brendan showed us that the Internet was a technology that was
going to forever change how we do business, and as we now know, he was very
correct.

In December of 1998, Abby Willowroot had a vision. The Goddess spoke to her,
and from that vision, The Goddess 2000 Project was born. We were deeply
involved with this, and we discovered that the Internet could be used to build
temporary projects within communities, and that communities given information
over the Internet could create their own leadership. The result was that Abby Willowroot
led the Goddess 2000 Project to guide hundreds of events in over 64 countries,
and produced an estimated two million pieces of artwork worldwide.  What Rev. Willowroot showed us through her
vision, we used as a template in building Witch School, which opened online on
September 4, 2001.

 At that time, the Internet was exceedingly expensive with URLs costing $75.00 each, and independent web hosting was also very pricey. Ed drew upon what he learned from
a workshop/lecture series led by Muhammad Yunus on micro banking and finance at
the 1999 Parliament of the World Religions in South Africa. The premise of this
lecture series was that communities can use small amounts of money to leverage
any size project, as long as it is done in increments and in amounts the
community can afford.  Dr. Yunus worked
with Grameen Bank, which specialized in microloans to lesser developed nations
and minorities, to create economic and social development from below, and
alleviate poverty with a free market solution. Dr. Yunus and Grameen Bank went
on to win the Nobel Peace Price in Economics in 2006.

 In 2001, this idea seemed like the only way to build the site, so Don Lewis, Ed Hubbard, and Lisa Tuit began building WitchSchool.com in the kitchen of Don’s apartment in Traci
Wood’s house. At that time we launched Charter Memberships, and the rest has
become history. We followed some of the best advice in the world, and we were
rewarded with a community-driven and supported project, that succeeded beyond
all our expectations. And our Charter Members have been rewarded well for their
support and will continue to be as part of this magnificent dream.

We want to thank all our members for supporting us, a special thank you to our Charter (lifetime) Members for their faith and confidence in us, and continued support of our unique and growing educational
community. In our next eNews we will be discussing the future of Witchschool,
new futures, new tools.

Witch School has only 99 Charter (Lifetime) Memberships left in this offering.
If you wish to join us as a Charter Member, you can check out our page: http://www.classes.witchschool.com/why_lifetime.asp


Blessings
Ed Hubbard
CEO, Witch School

PS We are also supporting the World of Witches Museum. Check out their Facebook
page at http://facebook.com/WorldofWitches
and to support this community-driven project by supporting our KickStarter
Project at http://kck.st/aoyXq8