A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (6 page)

Breaking even.
Even if you don't want to go all-out and embark on teaching as a spiritual career or income booster, you can at least recoup the costs of teaching the class. Most students are able to pay small fees to help cover these costs, and you can always offer a sliding scale if you're concerned that some people are in difficult financial situations.

Not Charging for Teaching

Although you can justify charging for teaching in many cases, there are definitely some circumstances in which charging might not be practical or feel appropriate, or it might be beneficial
not
to charge. Here are some examples:

• Offering some free classes as a community service
  
• Teaching a free class to get the word out about your teaching, which can lead to paid teaching opportunities
  
• Teaching people you want to form a coven with, in which case teaching might be shared among multiple members for mutual benefit and charging might not be appropriate
  
• Helping another teacher by being a “guest teacher” in his or her class
  
• Casual one-on-one mentoring
  
• Doing a dry run of a class for a small group in order to practice for delivering it to a larger group
  
• Circumstances in which it's more important to pass along certain crucial teachings than it is to make money for teaching them
  

How Much to Charge for Teaching

If you've decided to charge for your teaching and you're trying to figure out how much, here are some guiding questions:

Are you
teaching
in person or online?
It shouldn't make that much of a difference, but it does. You might find it harder to charge more for online classes than in-person ones because of the (mis)perception that in-person classes take more work on your part. But online courses can often take even more time to set up, depending on the technological requirements, and there can be a lot of follow-up and individual assessment of students' work too. There's also the lingering issue that people still expect stuff on the web to be free. There's been a lot of discussion about “monetizing,” or making money off of things you offer on the web. The best ways to do that are still emerging.

How much work and time will you need to put in?
It seems reasonable to charge more for a class that takes more time to put together and teach.

How much will it cost you to teach this class?
This formula is completely arbitrary, but it can be useful for getting an idea of what your class costs you. Estimate (or measure) how long it will take you to set up and teach a class, and then multiply the number of hours by a reasonable hourly rate that you'd like to be paid. The resulting number is an estimate of the value of the time you will put into the class. Add it to the cost of rental space, supplies, handouts, and anything else you'll use in the class, then add any travel expenses. The final number is a rough estimate of what you need to make to break even. If you're not going to charge for your time but want to recoup your other expenses, just add up the other items.

What are others charging?
See if you can find out what others are charging for teaching services similar to the ones you are offering. You can also try writing up a syllabus and sending it out, either in person or online, and asking people what they think the class is worth.

What do you feel comfortable charging?
You need to feel good and satisfied about the amount you charge. You don't want to feel like you're selling yourself short, and you don't want feel like you're taking advantage of your students.

Making a Living Teaching Paganism

Once you start teaching, you might decide you like it so much or find you are so good at it that you'd like to do it as a career. Certainly it is a wonderful way to bring your spiritual and material worlds together. I have never taught Paganism professionally, so I asked Christopher Penczak and T. Thorn Coyle how they decided to make the transition from teaching once in a while to doing it more or less full-time. Christopher responded:

On a Friday, in meditation, the goddess Macha appeared to me. She had done this so many times before, asking me to “teach more.” I refused many times, and my personal practice was falling apart as I could progress no further in meditations and journeys. That Friday I said okay—but listed all the things in my life that took up my time that I didn't want to lose. I guess I thought the job was a no-brainer, but on Monday, I was laid off.

I think it was decided for me. Being directed by the Goddess to do something and having all your other job prospects close down in an otherwise prosperous economy is a good sign. After eight temp jobs to make ends meet, the last one burned down the day before I started, so I stopped looking for a real job and actually started teaching meditation classes first, and found I could make some money, enough to survive.

I was technically on unemployment for seven months, which helped me start a professional practice of healing and reading for clients, establish a class schedule, and I wrote my first two books.

T. Thorn Coyle's story of her transition was more about an evolution than a calling:

I didn't decide to teach Paganism professionally. Many years ago, after I'd been studying magick for around a decade, a mentor must have seen something in me and asked me to assist her with a class before she moved across country. This was eye opening—all of a sudden I saw that teaching could be a revolutionary act. So I started teaching like most people in Paganism, with small groups in living rooms. I also was on teams, helping to lead ritual. Teaching and leadership was an organic process unfolding over many, many years' time. It was never my thought or plan to make a living teaching magick or spirituality.

After several years, there came a point when I decided to say yes to whoever asked me to teach, wherever their group was in the country. A floodgate opened, much to my surprise. This was even before my first published book came out. After about a year of this, I realized I could no longer hold a day job and teach as much as people wanted me to. There still wasn't quite enough income at this point, but I was able to “fill in” in various ways. There have been many points since then when I considered taking on another job, but something has always shifted—whether in my attitude and approach or in the cosmos in general—and I've been fortunate enough to be able to pay my bills this way.

This whole process—from beginning to teach to making a decent living without a lot of financial stress—took twenty years. Would this have been different if I had set out to teach professionally? It is difficult to say. The thing I appreciate about my career, as it stands, is that the whole process felt very organic to me. I was working on my practice and my skills, started out sharing some things, people responded, I kept up my work, more people responded … and over time the transition happened to full-time. It doesn't feel like something I could have or should have planned, and I am therefore loath to give “business advice” to people who want to do this as their primary occupation.

Both Thorn and Christopher pointed out that it's very difficult to make a living solely teaching Paganism. Thorn was hesitant to provide any sort of a “formula” for others to follow to make teaching Paganism a successful career:

Most Pagans have deep distrust of professional clergy, and I don't see this changing anytime soon. Most people I have encountered who have set out to try to make a living teaching magic or spirituality full-time in a Pagan context have not been successful. I live in amazement and gratitude that I'm able to make a living this way. It feels like a fluke or a confluence of so many factors that it would be difficult to even tease out the components necessary to making it work.

Christopher's advice was about diversification:

If you want to do it as a full-time vocation, have multiple streams of income. Don't think you can make a living just teaching Paganism. If you are going to teach, branch out into other topics that have an audience with a little wider range and more disposable income—tarot, crystals, mediumship, Reiki, etc. Classes just on Paganism don't have enough of a draw for a large-enough income to live on.

Along those lines, one thing that is very important if you are going to build a career for yourself as a Pagan teacher is to diversify and market. In addition to branching out into other topics, as Christopher suggests, it's a good idea to supplement your teaching and build your reputation as a teacher by doing teaching-related things that can get you noticed, such as blogging, creating a website, doing free workshops and “guest teaching” in others' classes, having a strong presence on social media sites (especially Facebook, Twitter, and Google+), and posting podcasts and videos online. All of these things will help you become better known in the Pagan community and give potential students a taste of what your teaching is like. You are basically building a brand around yourself and your offerings.

Although Thorn was hesitant to mark out any sort of pathway others could take to make teaching Paganism a career, she did offer these words of advice:

There are five things I can share: Do your work. Maintain integrity at all costs. Stay clean. Don't get into public personality battles. Know your worth. Other than that, all I can say is good luck, because I don't think this is an easy way to make a living. I really should say “good fortune” because success requires a combination of us showing up at our best, with all of our talents and effort, but there is also chance—the roll of the dice cup—that will either meet our efforts or not. I'm more interested in people following the course of their soul's work, knowing that the current might shift in a direction that is different than what we first thought. That certainly happened to me. If you asked me fifteen or twenty years ago what career I was working toward, I would have said “novelist.” But here I am, because I kept following the energy as it opened in front of me.

Legalities

It's certainly not the most scintillating aspect of teaching, but Pagans who are considering teaching professionally need to consider legalities, such as insurance and taxes. The information here is meant to give you a starting place for examining these issues, but it's not comprehensive, and different rules apply in different cities and states.

Insurance and Waivers

If you're teaching out of your home, it doesn't hurt to check your homeowner's or renter's policy to make sure you're covered if someone has an accident on your property or tips over a candle and sets the place on fire. If you're teaching in a building or on land you don't own, whoever owns the space should have insurance. Ask the person you're renting/borrowing from about the insurance policy and safety procedures for the building or area. Some buildings won't allow you to have open flames or might have other restrictions to meet the terms of their insurance policies.

If you are teaching anything physical where people might get hurt, you might want to have participants sign a waiver. Waivers are enforceable only to a point, and even if you have one you might still be sued if something goes horribly wrong, but making participants sign a waiver signals to them that what they're doing might injure them, and that they need to be careful and take what you're doing seriously.

Another instance in which you might want to get waivers or permission letters is if you are teaching children or teens. As we all know, not all parents are happy about having their children run off to learn Paganism. Waivers or permission letters help you keep parents fully informed of what their children are getting into and what to expect. If an underage student's parents or caregivers won't sign your waiver or permission letter, don't take on that student.

Taxes and Licenses

If you are charging for teaching, in many cases you will need to report your income and pay taxes on it. The government doesn't recognize the spiritual meaning teaching might hold for you—it just sees a revenue source. As T. Thorn Coyle put it: “No matter how we look at it emotionally or mentally, the government requires that we treat anything we take money for as a business.” The government isn't going to hunt you down if you teach one or two classes and charge $10 for materials, but if you are thinking of teaching regularly or even sort of regularly, taxes are part of the picture.

In some cases you can declare your teaching income on your personal taxes, and in others you will need to get a business license of some kind. Another option is to start a small nonprofit and derive an income through that. Whether or not you need the license or to file for nonprofit status will depend on how much you teach, how you market yourself, what percentage of your annual income comes from teaching, and the laws of your state and city.

As I mentioned, I have never charged for teaching Paganism, but I have charged for teaching other things. Originally when I charged for teaching, it was related to a small sole-proprietor business I owned, so I reported the income as part of the business. More recently my teaching income has been very small, and I've been able to declare it on my “regular” taxes as consulting fees using an additional schedule.

If you have an accountant, ask him or her if you can get away with not having a business license. If you don't have an accountant, check out the government website for your state for the requirements and/or for information on forming a nonprofit. In my state, the information about business licenses and sole proprietorships (the kind of business where you are the only employee, and the most commonly used type of business license for people teaching by themselves and not as part of an organization) is in the Business License Service section of the Department of Revenue. In your state, it might be somewhere else. If you get lost in your state government website (most of them are such a mess that you'll need a compass and a canteen to get out alive), just Google “business license” and the name of your state. You might also want to check out any requirements that your city has on top of the state ones. The city I live in requires business licenses in some situations that are not required by the state.