Scholarships for Sliding Scale Courses
We understand some people are unable to give any compensation, even non-monetary, for courses. Recovery, poverty, disability, depression, low-spoons, lack of access, etc. are struggles we all have from time-to-time. We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to your& recovery efforts.
Please feel free to select the Offline Payment option and we will approve you&/you into the course (contact us if there’s any trouble getting in soon — we may not have gotten a notification or may not have checked our email) no questions asked.
If y’all/you are able to give something other than the full course fee in return for the course, please see the options below. Please send sliding-scale course fees to https://paypal.me/eclectic or to our Stripe account (this is taxable business income). See below for alternative donation info.
Quick sliding scale payment links: $5, $10, $15, $20. Enter your own amount. If you use these links, we will need time to manually approve your enrollment in the course.
We would appreciate keeping us in mind when y’all/you are doing better, especially if these resources were helpful or vital towards your&/your recovery. Any support, now or in the future, will help us assist more people.
Ways to Support Plurality Resource & Give Back for Courses
Here are some ways to support the work done at this site, but feel free to contact us offer stuff “outside the box” — who knows what’s possible:
Feedback
These might seem like a no-brainer, but so few people do it! The NUMBER ONE way to give back is feedback. Take a course & give feedback via the forums, interact with the instructor about the materials, comment on the lesson page itself, send suggestions to the instructor by email — What works for you? What fell flat or didn’t fit for you? What works/doesn’t work, what do you/y’all believe should be added to the course to make it more complete, etc. We cannot emphasize enough how much knowing that y’all got something from the materials helps, even if you don’t feel that you have constructive feedback. It also balances valuable critical feedback when something doesn’t work. Both are valuable.
Review the courses y’all complete! You can rate them — but also please take a moment if you feel comfortable doing so to leave a note for future students browsing the courses about whether it met your expectations, what issues it resolved, whether it was easy/hard, etc. Help them wrap their head around what to expect from the course, or the types of issues it helped with for y’all. Folk look at reviews to figure out which course(s) to take, and whether others benefitted from them. How to Rate & Review Courses blog article.
Time
We could really use a hand with various time-donations on the site:
- Create a course (if you are plural) — we will accept any reasonable topic, it does not need to pertain to plurality; the only requirement is that the instructors are plural. Share your special interest area or hobbies, crafting, cooking, instructions, academic topics, programming, design, etc. Learn about being a presenter on Plurality Resource – All instructors must join this course! (you don’t have to complete the course to start making classes — it’s so we can email all the instructors and know that you are interested in being an instructor)
- Volunteer to correct machine transcripts/captions for linked materials (podcast episodes, videos, etc.). We will help set you up with machine transcript correction software, all that’s required is audial discernment, the willingness to flag things you aren’t sure about, some time, and a browser with javascript (or maybe the Otter.ai application). We also need audio descriptions for any visual materials or videos that are essential to the courses. There may well be other volunteer opportunities as well.
- Spread the word — we’re pretty lousy at promotion of our projects (and super-busy with writing and developing curriculum and various other projects). Let others know that you/y’all found the website, and what you& liked about it along with links to help others discover the resources y’all liked the most.
- Contribute content or comments on Kinhost.org — we’re expecting a lot more cross-references & cross-referrals between these sites, so any improvement to one will help the other, and by extension will help the people who take in the content. Help support the site, update articles, make comments about your own experiences, or let us know if an article is broken and needs repair/updating. There’s also a long list of stub articles that need help to be more complete.
- Similarly CerberusPlural.org needs journalists, op-eds/opinion columns, etc. if that’s more your thing. We are happy to be the managing editor of CP — but we need contributions to edit. Happy to teach what we can about journalism and writing.
Site Monetary Donations
Who says no to money? Many of the courses & other website resources we provide are free or sliding scale with a few exceptions. We, however, pay monthly fees for our server, and various software we utilize to make everything tick (this site was probably the most expensive in terms of start-up costs after all the plug-ins were added). We deeply appreciate when folks who have the means give to support those who do not — excess supports sliding scale and scholarship-based private coaching, software, or further enhancing the functionality of our server or other community websites. We hope one day to be able to drop all our other gig work to free up more hours to work on projects like these. Please send sliding-scale course fees to https://paypal.me/eclectic (this is taxable business income) & financial gifts to https://paypal.me/crisses (non-taxable gift — please do not use for sliding-scale course payments or coaching fees etc., but as an occasional wow thanks for everything you do is ok — we still may end up claiming & paying taxes on this, but the difference of intent actually makes a difference legally).
Prefer to subscribe and get some bonuses? We do have a Patreon account (counted as taxable recurring business income) — and please feel free to use this as a substitute for sliding scale course fees. Our ongoing patron support is how we were able to free up the time and resources to create this website in the first place, and helps cover sliding scale scholarships and coaching pilots (that are later turned into self-paced courses on the site). We try to at least send some type of bonus materials every month but we’ve also given away the PDF for the Ship’s Log Planner for free, book or course previews, special videos, etc. We don’t put essential content behind the paywall though — but we do hold ourselves accountable to our patrons and will let them know what we’ve been up to with their donations lately.
Note: you can also FOLLOW us on Patreon. You don’t have to be a paying patron to get some idea of what we’re up to, some things we post publicly there.
Goodies
We have plural-centric products if y’all like books or swag. Y’all can help support our work and get something for yourselves at the same time. Win/win.