The Last Waltz – Final Update on our Digital Reading Program May 21, 2021 The End of Two Years’ Efforts! The Last Waltz, But Not the Last Dance! This is the final fundraising update of the Teach Your Children to Read Well Indiegogo Campaign. Here’s what happened. The money was raised, budgeted and spent. The product was designed, built, beta-tested and brought to market. The marketing and advertising are slowly taking hold in 3 markets – therapists, homeschoolers and charter schools. All of the perks have been delivered. There are no loose ends catching on fire that we are aware of. The mission has been successfully completed. Nice work team! Incredible, incredible efforts from everyone! But like many babies learning to walk, the financial legs are still shaky. We are paying down debt and keeping our heads above water. We have retired two-thirds of our debt and are gradually reducing the remainder. With good fortune, we will hit break-even in 2022. We are involved in a World Vision competition, the Ready 2 Read Challenge, that could lead to a US$ 350,000.00 prize. Some lucky and deserving agency will be selected to create and support a digital reading program that can be used in third-world countries for teaching English to beginning readers. Their first choice of countries is Bangladesh. Our digital reading program is being well received. Orders are increasing every month. Clients are returning to purchase more blocks of lessons. Reports to my customer-relations telephone calls are positive. We are having very few customer service calls, thanks mostly to the “help” instructions Andrew Gilchrist has added to the Dashboard and the series of Help Videos now in production. It has been a challenging adventure as you are well aware from reading the updates. We have many people to thank – The Maloney Method team of Andrew Gilchrist, Mark Bishop and myself, Michael Summers and his Nesda team, as well as Wilf Wilkinson, Brian Hall, Sharon McConnell and the Rotary clubs that supported us. Thanks to Angela Macri, Tanyss and Gem Munro from the Amarok Society for coordinating a test-run in their Bangladesh schools. Dr Will Burrow for offering to assist teachers to buy our program and all of the customers who bought our program. And Now for Some More Good News We have delivered the digital reading program to two New Orlean’s Charter Schools! We also now have the digital reading program being used by Amarok Society’s Mothers of Intention in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. These women are able to teach children who cannot attend public schools because of their poverty. The mothers and children learn to read using a cell phone, an Internet connection and our software program. Given that there is an estimated 900,000,000 million children globally who are illiterate, we hope and expect to impact their lives as far and wide as possible. Thank you for being a part of this adventure. It is my belief that the software we have created and other digital software programs are about to become the next waves of change in education. COVID has set the table for digital learning. It caught educators short-handed and ill-prepared. The shift will be to create programs that reliably teach children so that the teachers can supervise learning using programs that have a proven history of success. It will be a great help to everyone; teachers, parents, administrators and most of all STUDENTS. We are working to make this product a success so that we can add other similar reading, spelling and math lessons to our system. Thanks for all of you help and support. Respectfully, Michael
