Creative Educators’ Coop Initiative

The Story, In the Beginning.

In April of 2023, I reached out across the planet in the hopes of attracting learners and educators and artists from just about every culture to come together and produce some pretty amazing products in multiple languages as transcreated by someone from that culture and ethnicity and usually the writer themselves. I used all the social media platforms to find people I thought were sincere and talented. I posted adds on social bulletin boards in various countries around the world. many under tight controls deleted my postings. They took offense that someone wanted to engage their artists and educators. I recruited 27 different people of assorted ethnicities and cultures from 17 different places in the world who together spoke 38 languages and were interested in creating learner-accessible engaging, auditorial and visual, digital literature, learning tools, lesson plans, and curricula, all geared towards as many learners as possible in as many languages as possible, and when we say learner-accessible, we don’t just mean readable at different levels in different countries but also but also affordable in each country.

A 28-year-old Senegalese medical doctor and educator in Ethiopia traveling around village to village teaching healthcare, basic first aid, and food foresting. A Kenyan Dr. of forestry, food forester, educator, and water filtration specialist and his team on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya; A local teacher and her friend an artist also on the shores of Lake Victoria; two Congolese teachers, residents at a Ugandan refugee camp, attempting to keep a small classroom running and the camp fed and the typhoid down; bird photographer in Malaysia, an artist from Canada, several US artists and educators, and a food forester and irrigation specialist in the outback arid plains of India, to name a few was in my mind, a pretty solid start.

The Plan

We were so excited to turn their art, their stories, their languages, and their writings into engaging diverse usable skill and knowledge builder materials for learners of all ages across the planet, and free to communities such as the refugee camps and other impoverished communities. Their voices reading the materials aloud for a listen-while-you-read component made the materials even more usable and accessible. We decided to call our organization (our organism) the Creative Educators’ Coop and have to-date produced 63 products and counting. Though only I and two others are still at it. The first two weeks, several members dropped out as is always expected. Two months in and more dropped out. Some left half-way through their first pieces. Some on completion of their first pieces. Death took two of us. Another I’ve

been working with for three years going on four and has become a delightfully skilled hand artist has stepped back due to a cancer diagnosis, his 5th completion and master piece six pages shy of finished. Now it is down to two others and me.

The Challenges

We faced some serious challenges, time zones being the least of our troubles: desperate poverty and hunger; typhoid; people working two and three jobs with desire and passion but too little time to spare or working no jobs because there weren’t any to be had; little to no technology; internet instability, connectivity, and costs. While these definitely impacted retention, the killer was that less than a handful of us in the Coop were education experts and only one understood publishing on an advanced level. This meant a huge learning curve for most recruits. This ate hours and sapped creative energy, theirs and mine. It also meant considerable time and task to rack up a ton of product quickly, and a ton of product was the only way everyone would earn anything on their fair-share publishing contracts before the decade passed because we couldn’t launch and splurge on a big launch with fewer than fifty products.

Rights & Financials

Fair-share contracts state that the writers and artists retain ownership of their individual original works and can use them elsewhere in their original forms, and the house retains ownership of the finished compilation. Earnings are to be split in equal shares to each person involved in the production of their product the caveat being we work to limit the number of contributors per product to four. A project could have two to four producer-shareholders: house, writer, artist, transcreator. The house provides project management and production, instruction, editing, art and branding, talent management and recruitment, fees, marketing, etc., so the house counts as 25 to 50% of a project. The remaining 25 to 50% goes to the other one to three parties involved in the production. If there are three of us then everyone gets a third. If there are two then we get 50% each, and if there are four, each gets 25%.

We spent $1K on a 5-day launch campaign which earned us over half a million hits globally but sold nothing. The hot link took them to a products page and a free product download on an about us page with other products shown as well. The campaign earned us half-a-million clicks and proved utter ineffective for sales. We are still trying to figure that one out.

The Cool Down & Burn Out

While I functioned as the house house, I was also an artist-educator producing my own products, an artist-educator producing curricula and literature, teaching three to five classes six days a week, working on a NADA-UCLA film project and intermittent grant-funded research projects for USF and doing doctoral course work. As the talents began to drop off under their own strains, it dawned on me how exhausted I’d become keeping up with everything on my end. It was killing me, so currently, it’s just me and two others plodding forward and I feel more relaxed and rested. If we figure out how to clone me, then I may rekindle the fire, but for now, we’ll just keep producing at a much slower rate and without as broad a spectrum as we hoped for out the gate.