Earth Hospice: Launching with the Dawn after the Longest Night
Here's the story of Earth Hospice to date as we are on the eve of the launch of the Community Share offer...
Going back to 2017 I had walked the Portuguese Camino de Santiago where I was meditating on the origins of Hospice. On the pilgrim ways they were places of rest and respite, hospitality, rather than places to die. I was struck by the vision that this is what our communities needed; a place of Hearth, heart and hope. Death conscious and grief literate places of gathering and rest. Not necessarily medical hospices but Gathering spaces.
Still in 2017, when the Death Doula course ran at my home and 15 people squeezed into my living room then the seeds of Earth Hospice were sown. I mentioned it in passing as a vision and my friend Ben, a hospice nurse, picked up on the fleeting mention and asked me to say more. From that circle a group of us took up the baton together, Ben, Denise, Haf, Peter and myself plus 2 more formed a community interest company and launched a crowdfunder to purchase a local retreat centre that was up for sale. And no… that was not its time despite the immense amount of work that went into it – it was sold before we came close and the money was returned. Incidently, we have since used that retreat centre to run this course out of! So, not all was lost by building connections there.
EARTH HOSPICE will not die, though, not as long as I have breath in my body I will strive to realise this vision. 7 years on and I fully believe it’s time has come. The World is a different place now, just think about all that has changed in 7 years!
Last year a friend of mine Angharad Owen, whose family I had been involved with in a death doula / celebrant capacity, put a call out on facebook saying that following the death of her Grandmother, matriarch and community stalwart, Eileen… the family home was now up for sale. A Georgian former rectory on Ynys Môn (what the English call Anglesey) called the Cloister (or sometimes Cloisters) at Llanallgo near Moelfre. A beautiful square dimensioned 6 bedroom house with windows orientated East for the sunrise with stables and some land. I commented to Angharad that we should have a go, again, at Earth Hospice and she felt the YES. The two of us asked Rev Sara Roberts, the community chaplain in Bethesda, Gwynedd to join us as the third founding member. Given that the building has heritage as a rectory and is inextricably linked to the 6th century chapel next door, Sara offers a fantastic bridge with the local community. Both Sara and Angharad are welsh speakers and in their own fields of work are really well known and respected locally.
The building has some serious chops in terms of spiritual history. St Gallgo’s church next door has had a church on that site since the 6th century; Gallgo and his brother Eugrad were the sons of the clan chief who led the Welsh from their lands on the Scottish borders to where we know Wales today. When the current incarnation of the church was built they found, under the altar the remains of 8 foot tall “giant” (reputed to be the remains of Gallgo) and they exhumed and relocated the remains. Immediately a curse befell the construction crew and people started dying, local legend has it, until they hurredly replaced the bones back where they found them and all was well again.
In 1859 a passenger ship called the Royal Charter ran aground in a huge storm off Moelfre and 300 lives were lost; the bodies were brought up to the Cloister to be laid out and Charles Dickens himself, a journalist at the time, visited to write up the story of the shipwreck. One of the griefs that sits on the local community is that the tabloids at the time, not Dickens surely, but the gutter-press made out that local people had looted the pockets of the dead when in fact they had tirelessly worked to try to save lives and to bring the dead ashore. This misrepresentation is a wound that is still unmourned today. You will notice in our documents that we call on the metaphors of a place of respite from the storms of the world for this is what Earth Hospice is.
Angharad, Sara and myself formed a Community Benefit Society which is a form of Co-operative and we have been grafting away all year to get the Community Share offer ready to launch. We thought it might have been May, then July… now we are about to launch it this weekend (provided it gets signed off by the Crowdfunder team who have all just popped their out of offices on and disappeared, one lone chap called Phil is manning their office!).
This is radically different to the previous attempt at raising funds for Earth Hospice. And it is the right model and this is the right time.
Community Shares are valued at £1 per share and we are selling them in bundles of 50. So the minimum amount a person or group can purchase is £50 upto £50,000. You don’t lose your money, it becomes capital for the project (although withdrawing it within the first 5 years is unlikely as that can only happen when trading at a clear profit); you can opt to receive interest on your shares of 5%, 2% or 0% the latter offering us the interest back to reinvest in the project. Whether you invest £50 or £50,000 you still get one vote. The cooperative is owned by its members. We will elect a management committee from the membership who are delegated with the capacity to run the day to day but all major decisions would be agreed by vote at the AGM by the membership.
So, stand by… provided we get the go ahead we want to launch this with the sunrise following the longest night. That would be the most poetic way to launch Earth Hospice but after 18 months of work to get it ready for launch we are all very surrendered about “right time according to the Mystery”. I will be spamming you somewhat to please please please support this project.
Community Grassroots Care of the Dying and Bereaved. A non-medical hospice. Based on the Pilgrim hospices where rest, respite and hospitality is offered to all. A community hub for death, dying and grief. A Hearth (H. Earth = Earth Hospice)…
You can sign up for the Newsletter for more updates and to support emotionally and spiritually here: https://earth-hospice-hafan-ddaear.ghost.io
BUT importantly when we do launch the community share offer this is how you can really really help, materially. In order to reach £650k we need 13,000 people to purchase £50 shares. Wow, that’s a lot I hear you say…
Imagine 1000 people each sign up for £50 and they then send this information on with a great deal of encouragement and enthusiasm to all their friends and family, their networks and connections… and of their networks 12 more people sign up. 1000 x 13 people… that’s how we will do it.
So when the link comes to you please do sign up via Crowdfunder and no… no… it is not easier for us if you donate money directly, we need it to go through Crowdfunder for ease of admin and to protect us and the donors… so please use the Crowdfunder link. And then please share share share with all the enthusiasm that will catch the eye of busy people. Share on your social media, forward on the email, talk to people about it. Yes we of course need the £50 investments but we also really need people to share and enthuse. If you just share on facebook with no commentary no one will see it. It is the enthusiasm that matters.
So this is a “stand by”… Earth Hospice is coming x
