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March 2004
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Although our enterprise has always been a labor of love and
not-for-profit and has always been a bit shaky financially—little
did we imagine that when we began the Journey Series, we would
be finding ourselves experiencing the end of a nine-year journey
with you, a journey during which we hopefully provided voices of
wisdom, insight and support. We regret to tell you that we have
reached a point where we must cease publishing.
There are many factors involved, and to make a long story short,
we simply have not had sufficient renewals, new subscriptions or
store sales to keep paying the bills. All JFL staff members take
time out of their busy working schedules to volunteer for this
enterprise, so that we only have to raise enough money to pay
the printing and mailing costs of each issue. Over the years,
many of our devoted staff have generously paid out-of-pocket for
mailings of single copies of the magazine to interested folks,
as well as incurring the costs of renewal mailings and other
such expenses. In order to keep a publication going, however,
new subscribers are always needed as past ones drift away for
various reasons. Keeping a solid subscription base takes
promotion, and promotion takes money that we simply have not
had. As you know from the delays in receiving your issues over
the last couple of years, we have not been able to get our
journal out in a timely fashion due not only to this lack of
money, but also to the sustained responsibility of producing a
magazine as a volunteer effort. We held great hopes that the
revamping of our web site would generate more interest and,
thus, make us more solvent, but alas, even though our webmaster
tells us we get many "hits," we are not receiving subscriptions
and income as a result.
Publishing is a business that we knew very little about when we
started, but we have all poured ourselves into this endeavor,
heart and soul, and are very proud of the service we have been
able to perform over these years, bringing a personal
alternative voice to important issues.
Now what? Many of our subscribers probably have at least one, if
not more, issues coming to you. We have completed work on the
next topic in the Journey Series, called
Modern Rites of
Passage, and it is now up here on our web site, in full.
Please check it
out. We will happily mail a photocopy of the articles to
those subscribers who do not have computer access. What about
those of you who will not have received all the issues owed you
with your paid subscription? Due to the fact that we still owe
about $5,000, we need to honor your subscription by providing
you with back issues of your choice, in lieu of a monetary
refund. You can read the list of back issues by
clicking the link to the left of
this article. If you are a subscriber you will have received a
coupon to return to us, noting which issue or issues you would
like to receive. Please note the address label on the letter.
Above your name is a line with your name and the letters REN + a
number. That number indicates the last issue of your paid
subscription.
To give you an idea of where you are at, the last issue we
published, Birth Wisdom, was No. 27. If you are not sure about
your subscription status simply shoot us an email at
subscriptions@JFLmag.com
What is the future of JFL? We intend to maintain the website and
to gradually add content; that is, to post articles from our
past issues that we would like to share with the world. The
astonishing breadth and depth of our 28 issues contains
literally something for everyone. They also reflect the life and
evolution of our school and family-based community here in
Albany, NY. It is our hope that the website itself can serve the
purposes of disseminating the voices, the ideas and the
experiences that have appeared on our pages over the last eight
years to a much larger audience. Perhaps some of you will see
the value of continuing in this fashion and contribute ideas on
how we, all of us, working together can make it happen.
In closing, our heartfelt gratitude goes out to each and every
one of you. You contributed to this satisfying journey with your
words, your art, and your interest. Your kind words of support
and appreciation over the years gave us the motivation to keep
going as long as we have. Take heart in the fact that there are
hundreds of you out there who share a loving, truthful and
compassionate energy devoted to living lives of service and
goodness on this planet. We will greatly miss our times of
sharing with you.
With love and blessings,
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