I'm all in favor of your initiatives, as well as all the general Let's build a bigger Steem Middle Class initiatives out there.

I am also here for the long run. I believe one of the things we need to seriously consider is that before we worry too much about onboarding a whole lot of new people from the "outside," we need to have our own house in good order... and that perhaps does mean having 10,000 Minnows ready and waiting to help be a sort of "welcome wagon" for the new people coming in.

In a sense, we lost a valuable resource — which could have worked well in tandem with the minnow projects — with the demise of @newbieresteemday and #newbiecontests. I was fortunate to start my days here under the "wings" of both @simplymike and @davemccoy and got started very fast thanks to their help... because of the initiatives they had running. Mike is still around, but Dave got sucked into some flag war and went off to focus on SteemMonsters instead.

My point here, though, being to imagine if we had 100's/1,000's of minnows standing by to each take maybe 2-3 newbies under their wing in a sort of community mentorship program.

We still have something great here... and the basic structure is that you can actually help yourself by helping others.

=^..^=