Hello EAT Community members.

My name is Chris Powers and I have partnered with Wayne to help scale up EAT.

After reading hundreds of emails from our partners, students, and audience members, I thought it appropriate to publish a post to address each major piece of feedback and let you know that we’ll be working to improve it. Here’s what we’re working on now, and in the future:

Mistakes In Recent Emails and Unwanted Communications.

First and foremost, we respect your inbox and the trust that you put in us to deliver high quality content about sustainable farming, ecology, business, and alternative health concepts to you.

EAT is a startup that believes in partnerships, and lately we have made a few mistakes related to either sending you emails with broken links or that do not pass our high standards of quality. 

We received several complaints from our audience members, and we are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

To fix these problems, we implemented an editorial review process to make sure that all emails are tried, tested, and approved before they go out to you in the future. We appreciate your support and your patience.

Welcoming New Members

We have a lot of great content on The EAT Community, including hundreds of live and pre recorded webinars from dozens of expert speakers in the areas of permaculture, ecological agriculture, environmental topics, renewable energy and much more.

When you first sign up for our email list or visit The EAT Community Website, at least as of this writing on 7/26/2018, it is not totally clear what we offer, or that you can access all of our webinar replays by creating a login. 

Over the next few weeks we will be making usability improvements to the site to make it easier for you to access the hundreds of hours of content that we have created for you already.

Easier Webinar Replay Access for non US Time zones

We are a company based in the USA, and so most of our work efforts happen during regular US business hours.

That said, we respect the fact that we have audience members, students, and paying customers from around the world.

Right now, all of our webinars are available to view via free replay, but the process for accessing them can be a bit confusing. As such, we will be making site wide improvements to make it easier for you to view webinar replays.

In the meantime, you can sign up for EAT Free, log in, and view webinar replays. 

Original Content, Case Studies, and Webinar Recaps On Our Blog

Related to the point above, and I would like to say it again. We have had a lot of phenomenal guest speakers, teachers and partners on EAT the last two years.

One of the most common pieces of feedback that we got from our members was that there's not enough time in the day to watch all of the sessions. We get that. 

The goal of the blog / future articles will be to share the information that we have to offer in more of a lightweight, easy to digest format.

Let us know if you're interested in becoming a guest contributor to The EAT Community blog and we can send you additional details on how we might feature your voice on the site. 

Technical Challenges and Bandwidth Issues

Because the EAT platform features long form videos our current format does not always work as well as it could on slow internet connections.

We heard from you that you like to listen to the EAT interview sessions on the go, in the car, or while working outside on your projects. That means that bandwidth constraints are very important. In the coming weeks we will explore ways to make our content more easily accessible without a fast internet connection.

We also learned that our members have other technical challenges accessing or getting the full value out of The EAT Community and we will be fixing those too.

We have made a comprehensive backlog of these issues, and we are putting a process in place to prioritize and fix these issues.

High Quality Online Courses

You might not know this, but we offer high end courses on The EAT Community already.

Particularly in Wayne’s area of expertise, which is in Aquatic Ecology, Sustainable Fish Farming, and How to Run a Small Business From Your Backyard Pond.

We also have courses on Forrest Ecology, Pasture Raised Chicken Farming, and a new series about Aquaponics we're partnering to release soon.

We are in the process of hosting our online courses so that they are easier to find + buy.

In the next few months we will be partnering with more experts and releasing more online courses based on areas that our students are interested in.

Requests for Financial Aid & Partnerships From Our Students

We would love to provide funding for sustainable projects around the world. At the time of this writing, The EAT Community is running as a bootstrapped startup, which means that we do not have a lot of money to burn.

Eventually if we are successful enough, we hope to start giving back by investing in innovative technologies and connecting those entrepreneurs to high quality, values-aligned funding sources that are in line with our mission statement to: ‘make people and the planet better.’  

In the meantime, we hope to help our community members by doing the following:

1. Sharing high quality information for free via our webinars, blog posts, and maybe future podcasts.
2. Helping you to start small businesses / share information about how to create value with your ecological enterprises.

We are however interested in forming partnerships with people in the following areas:

1. Guest speakers for our live webinars.
2. Guest blogger to write case studies, essays, and share interesting posts related to ecology, sustainability, agriculture, and unique business models.
3. Experts who want to launch courses or who need help with managing their digital assets.
4. World class experts in various environmental or ecological areas.
5. People who want to host live events related to the topics we teach about.
6. Investors and entrepreneurs who are solving fundamental problems related to ecological, environmental, alternative energy, and sustainable food topics.

As we get farther down the road, we hope to build or partner with an investment platform to better serve our community. 

EAT is a startup, so there will always be little things that are in the process of being improved. We appreciate you being with us on this journey, and for all of the people who have been webinar attendees, speakers, customers, and students, we want you to know that big things are on the horizon.

A 1% improvement every day compounded means that we’ll be ~3800% better after the first year.

If you see a fit with any of the key areas of interest above, or you think there might be another opportunity for us to connect, please contact us.

Pura Vida,

-Chris Powers

PS - Is there something else we’re missing? Let us know in the comments below or email me at chris [at] wildgrowth [dot] org so that we can make EAT a valuable resource for you.