How The Motherline Connects People to the Earth via Digital Tech and Paid Memberships Pro

People choose to live off the land for various reasons. Those who worry about climate change may choose a new agrarian lifestyle to reduce their impact on the environment. High prices for food & housing in urban areas may be another incentive. Many want to connect more meaningfully with a community with whom they share values. Nearly all are seeking an alternative to an urbanized, industrial life where they can live closer to nature. The common thread in all of these is sustainability.

Digital technology may be part of the very over-industrialization that these movements seek to separate from. However, The Motherline, an Oregon-based non-profit agricultural sustainability project, makes it work for them. Using Paid Memberships Pro they use tech to expand their reach through online member education.

Connecting Art, Community, & Sustainability

The Motherline is more than a movement to protect the planet, improve local health and work toward a reparative economy. They serve to inspire other generationally impoverished but resilient rural communities like their own, having developed a wealth of earth-based knowledge between them. These topics and techniques are now available to subscribers via video. 

What sets The Motherline apart from many other local sustainability projects, however, is a unique woman-based vision for rural life and community that incorporates dance, film, and theater arts. One notable shared movement activity is their weekly dance practice, an expression of commitment to the earth’s restoration and re-creation.

Instructional Homesteading Videos

As a non-profit, The Motherline had already been offering youth classes for fifteen years when they received grant funding for short films on homesteading skills. They realized that monetizing the videos would help build their community and expand their outreach beyond the Illinois Valley.

Dedicated to carrying out this vision are Resident Artist Ariadne Grace, and Co-Directors Cindy Palacios and Alisa Ocean. While each holds a special focus of her own, together they explore the intersection of agriculture, self-sufficiency, and the arts, supported by the valuable videography talents of filmmaker Trina Christine. 

The subject matter and techniques they share in their instructional videos range from primitive survival skills and forest living, to topics like goat husbandry, cheese-making, permaculture gardening, composting, reparation gardening, water systems, and fermented foods. The community also shares woman-centric wisdom like cyclical birth control and fertility awareness, storytelling, and fiber arts. To share their knowledge and raise awareness of their events, they needed to create a website. 

This rich body of knowledge and the group’s commitment to earth stewardship shape the content of their art-film quality videos. Exclusive to subscribed members, the videos inspire new homesteaders, and provide them with much needed tools to embrace a land-based lifestyle.

Creating a WordPress Membership Educational Website

It was Co-Director Cindy Palacios who had familiarity with WordPress, so it was natural for her to rely on it as the best platform for The Motherline website and to promote their events and videos. 

Using WordPress provided The Motherline the opportunity to create a membership-based community. This community brings together women homesteaders who support one another and share their skillsets. Paid Membership Pro also allows The Motherline to restrict video-viewing access to paying members. This feature helps generate income to further support the group’s goals and activities.

How PMPro Elevates The Motherline

As Cindy researched the different WordPress-based membership plugins available, she became convinced that PMPro would be the most useful and user-friendly option for The Motherline’s website. Its affordable price point was an added advantage.

I would never have been able to set up the paid membership business if it weren’t for all the tools that PMPro provided. I was so pleasantly surprised by how easy it all was.

Paid Membership Pro’s management and organization features that Cindy finds particularly useful include:

• Tracking and managing of payments and memberships 
• Notifications of new subscribers
• Customer support

Perhaps even more critical to the success of The Motherline’s membership model is PMPro’s ability to restrict content, which Cindy has implemented to restrict public access to posts, pages, categories, and tags. This allows The Motherline to make specific content available to paying members only, and designate what content is available to the public.

Video: Restrict Content with PMPro

The Motherline offers two tiers of membership:

• The “Motherline Member” at $10.00 a month gives access to all members-only content: homestead help videos, upcoming live events, and access to the discussion forum.
• The “Homestead Hero” lifetime membership tier is available at a one-time payment of $150. It provides access to all of the above content, with the additional advantage of early bird registration for live events and skill-share gatherings, and a 30-minute consultation with Motherline leadership.

The Motherline also uses PMPro as a convenient payment tool for non-membership options like one-time classes and community events. 

As a non-profit organization that has always been supported by grant funding, it feels great to see some earned income of our own start to come in.

By using digital technology from filmmaking to web-based member management, The Motherline is able to promote and elevate their commitment to stewardship of the natural environment, earth-based living, and integrated artistic connection to the environment. Its greater impact will boost outreach efforts to local organizations and businesses as they work on cooperative efforts to increase sustainable economic opportunities in the Illinois Valley area.