I’m delighted to announce that we have just finalized the selection of six new educators to the BED DIRECTORY this week. We have two each in three categories. There are two new prominent US-based BDSM Educators, Catherine Gross and Eve Minax — two new foreign-based BDSM Educators, Daniel (Hungary) and Silent Teddy Bear (Bulgaria) — and two new well-loved educators from BED’s Board of Directors, Sir Guy and boy Randi.
Congratulations and welcome to them all!! We seriously love serious, competent, seasoned educators!
Accepting foreign-based educators was not in the original plan because we were not expecting their support at this early stage. But with some great applications coming in, the Board has unanimously agreed that foreign-based educators doing important work in their home countries meet our mission of “Education without Borders” as long as they prove they are qualified by completing the application process. We are very happy to say that all of our chosen listees are immensely qualified for listing!
Over on Twitter, a young educator commented she wasn’t sure she’d qualify. We at BED place a stronger emphasis on a passion for education and activism than actual numbers of classes taught. If you are deeply committed to sex-positive, BDSM/Leather/Kink education, and can point us to websites, blogs or active social media engagement (Instagram or youtube), you might just qualify even if you haven’t had years and years of experience making public speeches. We hope to level the playing field between “wise elder” and “energetic younger.” Every person listed in the Directory completes the same form, and each application is judged on its merits.
We’d love to receive more applications for listing from groups, clubs, and organizations that run educational events. One of our goals is to be a resource to Educators seeking opportunities to teach and speak with groups large and small around the world and to help people around the world find good groups to attend and good educators to learn from. If you are officially allowed to represent your group, please fill out an organization application. Board members Lily Luminous and Queen Raini are in charge of all new organizational listings.
And, of course, we LOVE volunteers. We try to match volunteers with projects based on their skill sets and review each application carefully so you can be as happy working for us as we are grateful that you do! Our Volunteer Program philosophy is simple: we want you to do the work you enjoy the most. We know our future growth will depend on a powerful core of volunteers working both infrastructure and Community outreach. Current opportunities with BED include content providers (writing and photography in particular); librarians and editors; people with Social Media expertise, coding, web development, graphic, and other Internet skills; and experienced fund-raisers and PR staff. Boy Randi is our go-to person for volunteer vetting, training and mentoring.
With 7 vetted BDSMers on the Board of Directors and 2 recently approved new volunteers (thank you Luna and Kiki!), we are still just getting started. In this first stage of development, we plan to stay focused on building the Directory and the BED Digital Library into a valuable resource. But if you bring us new skills, we will start branching out according to your input and contributions.
I will be posting more about our future vision in coming weeks so you can have a fuller idea of our other goals for BED in 2018 and far beyond. Some of these include expanding the Library into a central source for all things BDSM Education, to evolve into a more interactive environment in the future, to offer a range of Educational services on-site and to keep you enlightened, entertained, educated and INVOLVED with our little BDSM Education Revolution.
COMING SOON: an advertiser/sponsor page for those who’d like to show their support for us at this embryonic stage! We may be a fetus but are we kicking it!
Join this Community Legacy project and let’s evolve together.
