New Beginnings: Looking Back on 2025 and Forward to 2026

Guest post by Jonah Andersson

With the new year comes a new era for our Community, and for me this is the first time writing a blog post for our website. I think there is much to look forward to in this coming year. As for the Community website itself, we have new members joining almost daily, I am learning how to design and manage the website, and I feel grateful for the new friends I am making in the process.

My Resolution for 2026

My New Years resolution this year is to try to communicate more directly with you all about the progress of the website and from now on, I will provide an update in the monthly newsletter, “Community Notes.”

Over the holiday break I have had an opportunity to reflect on what we are trying to build here and how to truly create a virtual community of trust and transparency. I will not pretend there are no challenges – there is much I could never have foreseen when we launched this project a couple of months ago, but I pride myself in being fast learner and firmly believe we will succeed in the end. I hope a year from now we will see a very active and vibrant Community on this website.

Challenges and Room for Improvement

Speaking of transparency, I will confess that the biggest struggle has been to create a suitable discussion forum, where we can interact as we have been in our old disparate online platforms. It turns out the platform we chose for this website has recently discontinued their forum function and replaced it with the Groups you now see as our main form of interaction.

So far, I do not believe it meets the requirements we have – it is not ideal for vibrant discussion, and it is difficult to keep track of comments and replies.

I am looking into various options to resolve this, including ways to reconfigure the Groups in a way that is more discussion forum friendly, as well as the possibility of integrating external platforms for the discussion part of our website. There are pros and cons with each option, and I am doing my best to find a way forward.

A Bright Future for our Community

Despite the somewhat clunky format, there have been heartwarming interactions between old friends and new in the Discussion Groups and that, I think, bodes very well for our Community.

I’m also very happy with the willingness to submit photos for our member photo galleries – I have received enough contributions so far to have quite a few in the pipeline, waiting to be processed and organized into galleries.

This kind of sharing of what are really personal pictures within the committed Community members area builds not only trust, but also a stronger sense of community cohesion, as we get to see how we all live our daily lives in very similar ways.

A Constant Work in Progress

In the Community Notes for January, I will provide more detail on the progress on our Education Center, featuring online courses as well as access to in-depth resources on our philosophy and the Books of the Cosmic Divine.

I am also in the process of polishing up the existing content on the website, including replacing the original placeholder pictures with member-submitted pictures – a process that has taken some time due to the need to solicit suitable pictures and obtain consent from anyone depicted in them.

Grateful and Excited

I think the best way to sum up my feelings at the onset of this new year is gratitude and excitement. I am incredibly grateful for my wonderful brothers and sisters in the Community and I’m truly excited about the path that lays ahead.

Together, we can build this movement to become a real force in changing social norms and attitudes, and create a wonderfully diverse, inclusive, rational, empathetic, accepting, and embracing society for our children and our children’s children.

Yours in service,

Jonah