The same way bunchgrass sometimes dies out in the middle and continues growing healthily whilke gaining news ground, in the last couple years the Icarus Project has lost its central organizing body while continuing to live and grow in many directions. As our funding ran out in mid-2010, the core group of people that were holding down all of the collective responsibilities scaled way back to organizational survival mode and a few volunteers made sure that the website stayed up, the forums stayed functional and spam-free, our bills got paid, our office got cleaned out, and our distro to major distributors (AK Press, etc) continued to happen. Meanwhile, our older publications need a facelift. The forums are less active than they used to be as facebook and other social networking sites absorb a lot of online community energy. Local Icarus Project support groups come and go, wax and wane, sometimes seasonally.
 
However, if we scale out in time and space, our greater Icarus community is actually blossoming and maturing. The original founders, Jacks and Sascha, are still best friends that continue to facilitate workshops together and live down the street from one another. There is an unofficial network of peer-to-peer support groups that has developed over the years and now spans cities across the United States as well as abroad. 

Since we started the project in 2002, a bunch of us have gone back to school and have gotten (or are actively getting) degrees in everything from social work and counseling to acupuncture, narrative medicine and the arts. Our materials are being downloaded and distributed on a regular basis. New zines are being published. Beautiful children have been born, documentaries have been unleashed into the public consciousness, much love has been made, and the forces of big pharma have taken some significant blows in the public arena.  

In this coming year what we aim to do is reseed the Icarus bunchgrass -- redevelop enough of a core organizing body that we can make decisions and continue to grow and develop and be a force for change in the world.  We want to attract a wide and diverse variety of Icarus allies and former members, provide a new platform for community conversations with our upgraded website,  create material that can be discussed in our local groups, sort through and highlight some of the amazing discussions that have happened in our forums over the past 10 years, raise some more money, and--very importantly--begin to develop a base of people from which to develop a new decision-making body for the organization.

More thoughts in the new year!