helping others – unscripted

In May this year, our family selected a family from sixteen family applicants to send to the Life Is Good Unschooling Conference in Vancouver, Washington. We Hogabooms fully-funded their trip and provided blog readers the opportunity to support us with donations.

Here is the interview of the Taylors’ expectations before the conference, and their experiences as related afterwards. The video provides a portrait of a family during a very specific time in their journey, and I found myself touched to share the Taylor’s lives a bit.

The total scholarship cost was about $700, covering four nights’ lodging, the conference registration fee, and $100 just-for-kicks spending money. Eight other donors/donor families stepped in and covered $375 of our total expense.

Thank you, readers, for your support.

I have a few personal words about our scholarship experiment.

First, I am grateful that despite the potential financial impracticality of such a venture for us Hogabooms, I took the plunge and, with my family’s support, led with my heart. Even though Ralph and I were careful not to require anything in particular for this experiment – that our scholarship family would end up enjoying the conference or that it would steer them in a particular direction – it is lovely to see that this conference helped the Taylors at this time in their life. Although we would have been happy to support an unschooling veteran family and are open to such a venture in the future, the Taylors were ideal applicants because they were on the fence, having just removed their child from the schooling system and having, by their own report at the time, little to no support from family and friends.

The scholarship expense was beyond what is “practical” for we Hogabooms but here we still are, having managed to breathe air and keep ourselves fed. I’m glad we reached out.

Finally, I completely adore my nine year old son’s contributions to the interview. He took over with confidence, he quite adroitly explained “fear” and “excitement” in terms of being an unschooling parent, and even employed “air dick quotes”. I especially found his breakdown of the unschooling commitment and the benefits and detriments quite touching. His contributions were, of course – unscripted.