 So, with me sort of ending up kind of seven years ago having my life change around after a car accident and sort of having to start into a whole new world and being met with a bunch of adversity, I think when you're sort of dealing with adversity, one of the things that comes out of it is or can come out of it is sort of a clarity and a resolve to start and do some of the projects that you're really passionate about. And so one of the projects for me with that was a project that I'd started with Kevin Ribble and Laurie Yearwood and it's all about, this is sort of the digital magazine side of it, which is all about sort of exploring different forms of contemporary storytelling. And we'd sort of set this up as a BCIT project back in about 2013, I believe. And we kept talking and talking about building an educational portal with it to sort of teach some of the stuff that doesn't sort of fit in with what we teach at BCIT. And we kept putting it off and off and off. And one of the things when you have to start working in a different way, because you've got, well, basically, for somebody, when we're talking about the pandemic at the moment, and everybody's sort of went from this state of self isolation and not being able to be around other people and anxiety and all those sorts of things and being worried about having lost their career. Those are all things that I basically faced through these car accidents and that a lot of the people in some of the disability communities that I'm in face to a huge extent every day of their lives, not just for the year or couple years that they're dealing with the pandemic. And for Lori and I, because we did lose a bunch of our business because I'm the face of our business and people were worried that I wouldn't be capable because I was dealing with new realities of my life. I'm more than capable. It's other people's perceptions, you know, aside. But it's one of the things we did realize was that we needed to start kind of thinking retirement and start planning for the future. And so one of the thoughts was really taking, you know, control over our own careers and starting to build the story to go classroom. Now, this was where we were at back in February. Because we wanted to have open as a part of this, one of my big hurdles was finding a platform that we can build it on that would be sustainable unto itself. And I had several renditions in years previously of this site. I kept with stubbornly trying to build with WordPress because I to make it sustainable. And so this version right now is I managed to find a plugin for learning management system here. So this is run on learn dash right now. And I've got sort of for anybody who's techie and geeky, I've got the studio studio press theme on here with it. But this I'll play the video because this sort of shares the vision on where we're going. Hello, and welcome story to go. I'm Erica Hartley, one of your hosts here. Story to go is a community that's designed to explore contemporary storytelling in its many different forms through traditional media, in addition to newer forms of media, in the digital arts. This is a concept that Laurie Yearwood, Kevin Rivel and myself first conceived of back in 2013 as a part of some work we're doing through BCIT's broadcast of media communications part type studies program. Here we're going to be joined by a number of our storytelling colleagues from TV to radio, to books, newspaper, magazines, blogs, podcasting, web series, gaming, experiential media and more as we explore storytelling today. We do hope you'll join us. And so the intent was to roll this out as an adult education website, where we just kind of did like dabbled for a few years and then the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit and we sort of saw everybody going nuts online. We're like, okay, we got this. This is what we've been trading for since my car accident. And so our initial reaction was, okay, people need to calm down. And so we've been building resources around that for years because of because of what I've been going through, but also because of some stuff Laurie had been going through. And so we started to build out, you know, a sort of different resources for teachers on on adding calming elements into their online education. Actually, these were already there. They weren't starting to build in that stage. We had all these resources that mainly Laurie had been building to to our travel magazine that is we're all on, you know, learning to relax and kind of chill and things like that and deal with what was going on in your current world. And so that was our first response. Our second response was also providing remote work things we've been working remotely for about 10 years. But then the next thing we saw is we're looking around, we're in this artist community. And a lot of our artist friends had lost their work and they weren't sure when it was going to come back. And so we decided to build story to go out in a much larger way than we initially intended. There's the thing that immediately hit us with a need was was kids programs. We actually had a lot of private classes coming in asking us to develop private classes for their kids group. So it actually started with a group of cheerleaders who wanted a storytelling class. This was this was that one right there. And it's changed a bit of our funding model. We always kind of thought the backbone was going to be kind of grab and go style classes with maybe a few private classes with more hands on stuff and live stuff for some of the participants. But we've we've realized for the first little while anyhow, private classes are our funder that sort of helps support things like our open educational courses. Another funder right now is because of some of the stuff I've been building previously, we've got some grants that we're working on that'll help to add more add more open access courses on here, including one that we've got from grant from the web on web monetization. So the web monetization model. So I'm going to be explore, you know, experimenting with that on this side and a couple other sites. And then building out an open educational course on that. And we're sort of building it's kind of becoming more of a community that we're building here, there's going to be a health and wellness studio. There is going to and Laurie's already started adding some of this content for the health and wellness studio, we're going to have a little culture hub. We work in the travel industry sometimes. So we want to be able to give back to that community that's really suffered over the last little bit. And then we're also going to be providing a teaching hub on there. I believe Danielle's on the call right now she's she's she's busily building one of some of the courses on the back end. And so we've got a whole pile of different reasons while people come to us. I'm finding people my masters are coming to us because they want a home for their open educational resources that's not going to disappear. And that's going to be invested in maintaining those. We've got artists who wants, you know, a different avenue to their career and maybe like a little bit of a nest egg that they're building for later on. We've got some people who just want to be able to teach different things out there. One more meaning. So yeah, um, it this is it's kind of this is where we're starting. We're looking for other people who'd like to play and like to experiment and get involved. I and and build. So I don't know if anybody has any questions on how what I'm still in the well, while it looks decent at the moment, there's still lots I need to kind of manipulate and fix on the back end. We've been kind of going through a series of different evolutions with our discussion boards, and I have still found anything that I really like yet for questions. Thank you, Erica. In in trying in keeping pace with the time and the lineup we have, I'm going to drop the link for all the participants to your OE connect page, and I would encourage participants to continue the conversation there. Drop your questions, any comments for Erica. Thank you very much, Erica, and we will stop the recording here.