We are raising £1500 to establish and expand the first ecological literacy web platform in Farsi (Persian). The audience of this web platform is the Farsi speaking community in Iran (but also other Farsi speaking communities in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or the rest of the world). This is the beginning of a life-long and open-ended process which we have started for the sake of the public good. Because the ecological challenges of our societies cannot be solved without each of us taking responsibility in participating in societal learning and increasing public awareness about the roots of the ecological problems and different ways that we can tackle them.

We are a group of Iranian PhD students currently studying in Sweden in different fields such as engineering, innovations, and environmental management. As we are exposed to many good literature and ideas on the topic in English, we think it is important that we try to act as mediators between the international community and the Farsi speaking community in translating some of the key important concepts into Farsi and making them available to the general public.

Iran like many other countries of the world is faced with serious ecological challenges. However, there exist relatively small volume of high quality texts with strategic, holistic, and cross-disciplinary approach about the roots of unsustainability, the principles of ecology, and the strategic areas in Farsi. Therefore, we want to create a web portal which produces high quality texts about socio-ecological issues. We translate seminal English texts from key authors and thinkers who has touched the sustainability and ecological issues from different angels. This is an eco-literacy project, because the kind of knowledge that we aim to spread is something which has to become a foundation of a new definition of "literacy".

By sponsoring our cause, you are participating in global effort to fight unsustainability, and you are doing it through the power of the commons (you and us).

We need more budget to be able to continue and expand this project. Our next task is to have a better hosting solution with higher band width, and proper back-up and security add-ons (which cost more than our current solution). In addition, we would like to allocate a small budget so that we can pay to the undergraduate students in Iran to motivate them to participate in the translation and content generation.

Every single cent of the gathered money will be used for empowering the non-profitable non-governmental cause that we have started. If we gather the minimum, we will have enough to cover the cost for the hosting+plugins for at least 2 years. If we get the full budget, we are planning to hire a part-time translating team (mainly from undergraduate students in Iran) in order to systematically translate few seminal books in Farsi and cover the costs of royalties (for the publisher) as well as possible publication in Farsi. If there is any extra fund gathered, we will spend it on more translating projects.

We will provide updates about the progress of our project every month by summarizing the number of article translations, hit rates, number of paid translators, fees paid for hosting, etc.

Sponsors of our project will be acknowledged and thanked in different ways. Most will be acknowledged and thanked in our website. A selected few will receive a personal signed thank you card with a beautiful photograph selected from the diverse landscapes of Iran to the selected sponsors. In addition, we will send a high quality handicraft gift made by Iranian artists in Isfahan or Shiraz to our top sponsor.

See our web site at: http://eco-literacy.net

Our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ecoliteracy.iran

Our google+ page: https://www.facebook.com/ecoliteracy.iran

We need your help for promoting our project. You don't need to give money to help us succeed! Please share this project with anyone you think would support us – on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email, telephone, in a chat over the fence or on your blog.

In fact, share it with everyone you know as we think it's a great idea, and the more people who know about it, the more likely we are to make this work out brilliantly.

And we know we said you don't need to give money to help us, but we'd love it if you did! Please sponsor us and help make this happen.