This is a three day weekend for Lace, so between housework, laundry, and Tikka Rose time, I will be posting a lot.

I have a lot to say, and a lot to share.

A lot of exhortation, and a lot of encouragement.

The staff of LoR have been going full blast getting the website up and functional. We have also been talking quite a bit about our hopes for, dreams about, and yes, our fears about this dream of mine that has gotten ever bigger.

We want this project to thrive. Because we want you to thrive.

And

We want you as invested as we have been and are about that as well.

Towards that end, we are going to tell you all a bit more about How The Sausage Is Made. We’ve been struck at the surprise of some of you as you now know a bit more of what actually goes into bringing you Lace On Race.

Well, in the interest of community building, and to press upon all of us that this is not just a place to consume, but a place to bring all of yourself, you need to know just what it takes to do so. You need to know the challenges of this, as well as the joys, and you need to know this in a more detailed way than we have done before. It’s hard to be invested in a space that is opaque to you.

In the interest of community building, and to press upon all of us that this is not just a place to consume, but a place to bring all of yourself, you need to know just what it takes to do so. You need to know the challenges of this, as well as the joys, and you need to know this in a more detailed way than we have done before. It’s hard to be invested in a space that is opaque to you.

So. The pieces we will be running this weekend will speak to just exactly that. We will talk in a more detailed way about funding. These last two Asks, where we were explicit about basic funding needs, have still not reached the level where sustainability is assured, and makes us, makes me, anxious about the future. We have said that if we cannot get to a basic level of reliable funding, then we will have to close our doors.

We are not kidding.

This hangs like a spectre of sorts even as we plan for the website, and our (many) ongoing and planned initiatives that, frankly, will take weeks, months–sometimes even years–to come to full fruition.

We gave this two months, November and December, to see if we can continue past January 18, which will be the two year mark of Lace on Race. So we are going to invite you in towards greater knowledge of what the need is, in the hopes that there will be greater ownership of that need, and hence for greater engagement, responsibility (both individual and corporate), and investment in a space that you all say you value and want to see continue.

We will talk about our new Gaggle 2.0 (or whatever it winds up being called) and invite Sustainers (or those willing to become Sustainers) into this enhanced level of participation and investment to this community.

We will (finally) launch our Mentorship and Accountability portion of ongoing and deeper interior work and praxis. We are so excited about this. For those of you who have yearned to go deeper, this is it. There is so much I want to share with you, places we want to walk with you, and we have been doing a lot of waiting for critical mass; for enough of you to model suiting up and showing up, kind candor, resilience and reliability. We need more of that sauce, and we need to start making it ourselves. Claire, Marlise, and I will mentor a cohort of those willing to double down on all we have been learning for the last two years; they in turn will mentor their own cohort, and so on. We hope that by the time we are done, we will have a team that will be the applied fruition of all we have been learning since 2017.

Toward that end, we will talk about churn. We have a lot of people who are, at least peripherally, a part of Lace on Race. That’s about 90 percent of folks who may or may not come to the site and read, or even may or may not remember that they are a part of LoR at all. It’s ever so easy to click like or follow and then promptly forget.

Of that other 10 percent who do comment occasionally and or sometimes financially engage, we are glad you are taking those first tentative steps towards fuller engagement. But we want and need more. We’ll talk about this.

Of these 400 or so, you all cycle in and out, which means we are doing sort of a very wearying Groundhog Day–every three months or so we are dealing with essentially a new cohort, which means another round of Onboarding; another round of teaching ethos and method; another round of retracing steps. That gets in the way of walking further and going deeper. We need a solid cohort that will stick around, stay in the game, and be reliable walkers. And we need that cohort to steadily grow.

We will talk about the new ways we do things. This site won’t be giving you reminders to come and engage; this is now entirely upon you. As we will be using our Facebook presence in different ways (groups and outreach), there will be less content there; particularly the important content that is not aggregated. You will have to take initiative and come here.

One thing that has been concerning in the last 10 days or so since the site officially launched is that traffic is way down at Facebook, and we have not seen what should be a concurrent jump in traffic to the site. We knew we would lose some in this transition, but this is worse than we expected.

We need to do better. The work will eventually be almost exclusively here; with minimal crossposting; you will have to make that transition as well.

Because of that, and also because in combing the archives, we have unearthed a lot of really good content (if I do say so myself) we will be re running, we are doing a soft pushing of the reset button yet again, even as we give you new content. Perhaps it would be wise to think of this as an entirely new space, and not just as a continuation of the Facebook Page. So this will be a time to re aquaint and re commit to what you have learned and internalized these past months.

And, because I simply cannot wait, I am dropping the next On Being conversation. Two things here: the guest amazingly seems like they are talking about Lace on Race very specifically; I was literally yelping when so much of what they talked about was stuff we were already doing. That tells me that we are on the right track, and we have to trust in our vision and our walk. And that we must keep going.

It’s also telling me that the exhortation for *all* of us to engage with *all* of the Relational Ethics Series is crucial. So if you haven’t done that, or only did it in a cursory way (that’s most of you, btw) start doing it with intention and purpose. It’s now a solid block of content, and if you give yourself the gift of engagement with it all, you will come out better and stronger, and more ready to do the applied work we are still doing together.

Ok. Enough for now. I will be tackling all of these points in separate posts. It will go like this: laundry; post; housework; post; finishing up my book for book club; post; rinse and repeat.

Busy long weekend, hopefully a productive weekend.

Thanks for walking with me.

Your Lace