It is with a lot of conflicting emotions that we announce that The Open Halls Project is shutting down all operations. We’ll be sunsetting our Facebook page, Facebook group, and we will no longer be doing any activities moving forward. Our email and website will stay up for now, but when we’ve determined the best way to shut those down, we will do so.
We’ve come to this decision after a lot of soul searching, attempts to get reenergized, and attempts to find a new element of heathen military support to focus on. Our original mission to connect heathen military folks with a community when they move from one place to another never went away. Still, it fell behind the goal to get our religious preferences added to the Department of Defense lists. We continued to provide other support, including care packages, community events, book donations, and at times documents of support for various religious needs of our community. With the reduction in deployed service members and the successful culmination of our mission to get Heathen and Asatru added to the religious preference list, we never really consolidated behind a specific goal or project for us to work toward.
At the same time, the military heathen community chose to embark on various quests that ran counter to our goals. We were asked repeatedly to support beard requests, which we just never wanted to get behind and we feel ultimately detracted from things we believed in more strongly as being important. On top of that, we had started the Open Halls Project as an organization that tried to be free of specifically heathen political points, because the organizational politics of the heathen sphere were occasionally detrimental to the needs of heathen service members. But, that has become more and more distant from our needs and goals as individuals. There are bad actors in the heathen world and the heathen military world in particular. We’ve occasionally taken a stand against specific bad actors but our stated goal of being there for all military heathens put us in a moral bind more than a few times and we’re just… done trying to thread that needle.
This isn’t to say we don’t think military service members, veterans, family members, and the various people in the heathen military space don’t need support. We believe that is still true and will continue to be true moving forward. We just can’t do so any longer as this organization. We had already divested ourselves of our 501c3 status several years ago, we are no longer a licensed corporation, and we have no funds on hand any longer.
If you want to belong to an organization that is doing good things, that is creating a good future for heathens as a whole, we recommend joining The Troth. They have a strong military support function, they are inclusive, and they match our personal values. The Troth was the first heathen organization to support us and our mission all those years ago when we were starting the request to add religious preferences. Are they perfect? No. No organization of human beings is, but they are trying to do better and be better and provide a growth mindset to heathen religion and culture moving into the future.
There are hundreds of people who have supported us over the years. We thank you for the care packages, the donations, the shares, the discussion, the various ways you’ve stepped up to help heathen military folks. To our heathen military folks, we did this for you and we thank you for being there for us while we’ve been there for you.
May your ancestors watch over you and the gods bless you.
-Josh & Cat Heath, Open Halls Project Co-Directors
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