Thank you for being among the first to sign up for our newsletter. My name is Thomas Loveheart and I'm the primary founder behind conceptualizing and executing the vision for Happy Castle, but it is not a one-person show. Happy castle is a community-building project in the high-desert of Socorro, New Mexico, aiming to build the world‘s first off-grid eco-commune, campground, and music festival.
Obviously, this is an enormously ambitious project that will require an enormous input and we have a long, long way to go before hosting our first festival. The most important resource, however, is our people. Communities, at their core, are people-based. This doesn’t only include our members who will live and work onsite, it includes everyone supporting the mission in other ways too. Our audience on YouTube following the project, our followers on Instagram, and all of you reading this article. With enough committed collaborators, I believe we can build anything.
A major goal of Happy Castle is financial self-sufficiency, so to our community, establishing the festivals and campground as positive revenue sources are as important to the success of the commune as establishing the eco-village itself. When you wear our merchandise, go to our festivals or visit our campground, you’re helping us build the commune. For now, don't worry about that, just sign up for our mailing list and watch as we develop Happy Castle from a lofty vision of art and community into a revolutionary one of a kind of cooperative income-sharing commune and festival.
Right now, our primary focus is on developing our website into a functional platform to coherently organize the project's spirit and aspirations while providing a place for our collaborators to connect as we prepare to break ground. The next stage in bringing Happy Castle to life is the Kickstarter. For those unfamiliar with Kickstarter, it is essentially a crowdfunding platform for bringing creative projects to life. Unlike other crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter is designed so that the backers of a project receive tangible rewards for their support. For our Kickstarter, the primary reward will be a ticket to our first ever Happy Castle Art Festival, starting at just $25. Backers who give more can earn exclusive merchandise, perks, campsites, and even their own Superadobe Earthbag Dome to stay in during the festival.
All together, we're hoping to raise $385,000 through this Kickstarter campaign which we'll use to build the eco-village and prepare the land to host the festival. At first, our annual festivals will be rather small, hosting less than 3,500 people for their three-day duration, but as we continue to grow, establishing evermore housing and infrastructure onsite, we plan to host thousands more across dozens of events throughout the year.
Ultimately, Happy Castle will become the ultimate venue for all kinds of events from festivals, to workshops, weddings and retreats. Follow along as we transform our 160-acre parcel of raw desert land into a thriving year-round community, campground, art-garden, desert farm, and music festival.
Although the festival will be a central theme of our community, at the very essence of it all is the commune itself which aims to offer a radically different alternative lifestyle to likeminded people who can't seem to find their place in a world dominated by greed and consumerism. Happy Castle seeks to establish the physical infrastructure for people to not only live comfortably and in community with others, but also to communally provide the necessary resources for our shared growth and fulfillment. An entire generation of artists, scholars, builders and dreamers lives without access to the resources they need to thrive, instead forced to sell their labor to corporations that only seek to exploit them while poisoning the planet. At this incredible point in human history, many of us are left wondering if this is really all our lives have in store for us. Every one of us is a creative, curious, intelligent, and limitless human who deserve so much more form life than $15 an hour at a job we don't like. Happy Castle hopes to answer that call.
Let's build a commune!
Instagram: @happycastlecommune
Reddit: r/HappyCastleArtCamp
Email: happycastlecommune@gmail.com
Twitter: @happy_castle
Youtube: @HappyCastleArtCamp
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