We are pleased to publicly announce Lauren Dueck has joined Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out as our Board Chair.
Lauren Dueck.
While she has been working behind the scenes for months, Lauren is now officially joining HARO’s other founding board members — R.L. Stollar, Nicholas Ducote, Andrew Roblyer, and Shaney Lee — as we move forward in the creation of our non-profit. The HARO board recently meet in Chicago to plan our next steps. We are excited with what the future has in store as we all work together towards HARO’s vision of “Renewing and transforming homeschooling from within.”
About Lauren:
Lauren was homeschooled from Pre-K through high school, primarily in Colorado, where she was involved in a myriad of homeschooler activities ranging from Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC) to Colorado Advocates for Home School Arts (CAHSA). She was also a part of the founding classes of CREDO Academy and the Colorado chapter of the National Homeschool Honor Society. In high school, Lauren competed, judged, and coached around the country in the National Christian Forensics and Communication Association (NCFCA), and contributed to several NCFCA sourcebooks as well. She received both the Boettcher and Coca Cola scholarships.
Lauren attended the University of Chicago, where she became deeply invested in a Christian student movement aimed at cultivating thoughtful, passionate faith in the university environment, and soon began to work on multi-ethnicity issues. In 2009, she graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA and MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures, and earned a place as a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship before joining the staff of a national evangelical campus ministry. Serving as Campus Staff at the University of Chicago for four years, Lauren became known as a specialist in crisis intervention and cross-cultural ministry. She has been a featured speaker at several national events, including Chicago’s Coming Together 6 conference.
Most recently, Lauren accepted a national role with the same campus ministry. In her spare time, she writes movie and TV reviews at Three Second Reviews and makes and sells vintage handicrafts. She also has a chronic case of wanderlust, and blogs about her travel adventures at FollowLauren.com.
Like a gardening hoe, when used correctly it can help bring life and vitality to living things. Homeschooling is not an end in and of itself; rather, the end is for parents to raise healthy, well-rounded human beings. But used incorrectly, a tool can harm the very things or people it’s meant to help thrive.
My parents were two individuals that I believe used the tool of homeschooling well.
Thanks to their efforts, I was given a solid education that enabled me to get into a well-known university on a full-tuition scholarship and graduate from that same university four years later with honors. I had a wide variety of experiences while homeschooled that I believe contributed to the well-rounded person I am today. And I grew up learning to be comfortable with being the “odd one out” when there were no other homeschoolers around, which I think at least partially contributes to my willingness to risk how others may view me in order to do the right thing.
I also have many memories of things I may not have been able to do had I not been homeschooled: volunteer projects I did during school hours, exploring subjects not typically offered in school, getting to set my own pace.
Would I have received these same benefits had I gone to public or private school, instead of being homeschooled? I’m not sure. I think I probably would have, because I believe that my parents would have taught me many of the exact same things regardless of where I went to school. Even those things I wouldn’t have been able to pursue in school probably would have been pursued in a different way outside of school.
But that’s not really the point I’m trying to make. I don’t feel any need to prove that it was “homeschooling” specifically that contributed to the many positives in my childhood that made me who I am today. The point is that, in the hands of my parents, homeschooling was a tool that they used well (even if they did occasionally make a mistake here or there). Homeschooling wasn’t the only positive experience I could have had. But, it is the positive experience I did have.
And my positive experience with homeschooling is exactly why I chose to become a founding member of Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO).
I know that many people see my decision as a sort of betrayal against homeschooling. They assume I must think homeschooling is deeply flawed and dangerous.
But that’s not it at all. It’s precisely because of my positive experience with homeschooling that I believe every child has a right to an equally positive experience. And just like any educational method, homeschooling is a tool that can be used for good or for bad. In the hands of abusive parents, homeschooling can be downright torture. In the hands of good-hearted, well-equipped, healthy parents, homeschooling can provide a child with an excellent education, and potentially open doors that wouldn’t be opened otherwise.
I think it will show that neither Homeschoolers Anonymous nor HARO are anti-homeschooling. Rather, we are a group of individuals who have a wide range of experiences with homeschooling, but strongly believe that all children have the right to a positive educational experience.
Every day on Homeschoolers Anonymous, we are hearing about how appearances can be deceiving — how heartbreaking abuse happens all around us, and can hide even in the families of homeschool leaders. We read Mary’s story, our blood boiling in horror that a respected family could inflict such emotional and physical abuse upon its children. We read about people like Susie, who were left on the side of the road with a few dollars in their hand because their parents were unwilling to love them for who they are. We read with shock that Jennifer‘s family would go so far as to threaten to kill her pets and remove all her belongings just to get her to obey an ideology.
We read these stories with heavy hearts.
Yet we also read with hope and amazement that there are so many of us willing to join together and create a network of love and support for people like this. When we announced that Jennifer needed assistance, there was an overwhelming outpouring of it. When we put out a call for stories on any number of topics, there is no shortage of people willing to speak up, to make their voices heard. There clearly is a need here, and there are many who want to help.
This makes us excited about what 2013-2014 has in store for Homeschoolers Anonymous.
We started Homeschoolers Anonymous on March 16, 2013. It is a cooperative project by former homeschoolers interested in sharing our experiences growing up in the conservative, Christian homeschooling subculture. Our mission is to make homeschooling better for future generations through awareness, community building, and healing.
Today, we are four months old. In four short months, we have accrued over 400,000 views on our blog. We’ve had the privilege of being a part of some amazing things.
Together, we are making a difference. We are changing lives.
Today I am excited to announce that Homeschoolers Anonymous is expanding to become a non-profit organization called HARO — Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out.
HARO: Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out.
To this end, our goal is to raise $100,000 over the next 60 days. We will be utilizing the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo to move HARO into official 501c(3) status and put into motion several concrete action plans.
What does this mean?
Crowd-funding means that we need you, the members of this community, to help us achieve our fundraising goals.
We need you to donate — once, twice, or however many times you can in the next two months. But whether you donate or not, we need you to share this call for help with your friends and family. We need you to talk it up on Facebook and Twitter and your favorite social media sites.
Creating a 501c(3) means that HARO will be a real, live non-profit. We will have tax exempt status, and (when the IRS approves it), donations to HARO will be tax-deductible. (Note: HARO is not currently a non-profit and donations to this campaign are unfortunately not tax deductible.)
We are proud to unveil some highlights from our future projects:
Homeschoolers Anonymous website
The Homeschoolers Anonymous website will get a professional makeover, greatly improving its internal structure and usability. We also plan to set up a forum with dedicated moderators.
Annual HARO Convention
This wouldn’t be a homeschool-related organization if we didn’t plan a convention, would it? In all seriousness, the internet is a wonderful tool for disseminating information, but in-person community and engagement is important as well. To this end, we will develop an annual HARO convention to begin in 2014.
The Mary Project:
Named in honor of the pseudonymous author of our most popular series, the Mary Project will undertake a public awareness campaign to fight child abuse in homeschooling communities — the campaign that we asked HSLDA to undertake and that HSLDA ignored.
Broken Arrows Initiative:
The Broken Arrows Initiative will create a tangible and concrete support system for homeschool graduates in need, as well as lifelines for current homeschool students in unhealthy situations. Physical, legal, and financial assistance are all included in this initiative.
R.A.H.A.B.: Research Alliance for Homeschooling Attitudes and Beliefs
Concrete data is important when you’re working with any demographic, and homeschoolers are no exception. Data helps us determine where we can do the most good and evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts. R.A.H.A.B. will be the arm of HARO that researches and documents data pertaining to the homeschooling movement.
For more detailed information regarding each of these projects, click here.
What if you don’t hit your fundraising goal within 60 days?
Indiegogo’s “flex-funding” campaign model means that, unlike Kickstarter, it’s not all or nothing. If we don’t make our goal, we keep what we raised, minus a 9% fee to Indiegogo. However, if we make our goal, that fee goes down to 4%! While we plan on achieving our goal, we will work with whatever the results are. We will start with what we have and go from there, focusing on buildling a secure, stable infrastructure, filing paperwork to be legally recognized as a 501(c)(3), and pursuing grants to round out project funding and offering assistance to those in need.
Who are the founding board members of HARO?
The four founding board members of HARO were chosen based on several criteria, not the least of which is that they have the trust and respect of many members of the communities we are building online. HARO board members not only need to have skill sets applicable to founding a non-profit, but also have demonstrated that they are invested in our future and passionate about our vision. A community fundraiser of $100,000 is a serious matter, and the public faces of this organization should be ones that you know will use that money responsibly and wisely, for the good of future homeschool generations.
The board members are:
R.L. Stollar
Nicholas Ducote
Andrew Roblyer
Shaney Lee
We will be adding a fifth board member in the next few months.
You might think this sounds audacious. If so, we agree with you. But that doesn’t faze us.
Before we launched Homeschoolers Anonymous, we thought that idea was audacious as well. And here we are now, four months later, with hundreds of thousands of views. We’ve been covered byThe Daily Beast, NPR, Mother Jones, The Guardian, and AlterNet. We’re on the brink of creating an organization that can make concrete efforts to improve homeschooling communities for future generations by educating homeschooling families about abuse and self-injury, building financial and emotional support for the next generation, and continuing to share our stories and experiences.
You can make this happen. Donations of any amount are crucial. Sharing the link to this page or the Indiegogo page on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc is even more so. We need you to spread the word.
Will you help us to continue to help others?
Together, we can improve our homeschooling communities.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 