Encounter team: assembled!
Christmas at last, and the last few months have been properly full-on. We have an anchor investor and a clutch of brilliant shareholders, we’ve applied for and been granted SEIS status, and we’ve issued our first shares. We have a website and socials, a growing mailing list, and we announced the idea to wild support at Green Man Festival back in August.
And now we have an amazing team in place: as well as me (vision and propulsion), Adrian and Mike are handling the business and marketing side of things; there’s James on branding and design; Miles Richardson, Professor of Nature Connectedness, who’s come on board as an adviser; and last but not least, we now have an expert product manager, Jon. Jon has a duck named Basil Fawlty, which as you can imagine is giving us all no end of delight.
In case you missed it, I’d like to draw your attention to this brilliant article in the Guardian about the transformative power of nature. I particularly loved the idea of ‘soft fascination’, a new term to me. The evidence really is mounting now for what many of us know already, by instinct: that nature is good for us, and that without a regular physical and emotional connection to it, we suffer – and eventually, because of that, nature suffers – in small but crucial ways.
That connection is what we want to help create for people with the Encounter app. Thank you so much for supporting us, whether that’s via an investment, by giving us your time, spreading the word, or just by cheerleading for us as we make it happen. The fact that so many of you have shown that you’re interested is proof we’re on the right track.
Finally, it may be winter, but make sure you still take time to notice nature, whether it’s the jubilant song of a walnut-sized wren, a cloud of mistletoe high up in a bare tree, frost silvering a spider’s web or the low, golden sunlight of a December afternoon. And if you’d like to rewild your timeline a little I can thoroughly recommend following Phil Gates, aka Durham Country Diarist, and Jane V Adams, author of Nature’s Wonders, on Instagram or Threads.
Wishing you all the magic of midwinter – indoors and out!
Mel
