from Earth First! Newswire
Illustration by Skunk
Friends and Subscribers,
The Journal Collective planned to launch a huge fundraiser this week. We have been contacting distros, supporters, and donors, preparing to come out with new merch and incentives, and getting ready to send out letters asking for donations. Given the state of the world today, we don’t feel it makes sense to forge ahead with a traditional fundraiser. People are rightly focusing on caring for themselves and their communities during the unprecedented crisis that is COVID-19, and we don’t want to distract from or downplay the gravity of that reality. But we also can’t afford not to be transparent about where we are: struggling financially, as many small media projects are, and have been, even before so much of the world came grinding to a halt.
For the time being, taxes, bills, and other office expenses haven’t gone away. Raising money this month is necessary if the project is going to survive this year. Any money raised this month will go towards keeping our office space up and running, paying our staff, keeping up with requests for free prisoner subscriptions, and publishing our upcoming 40th anniversary (Spring/Summer) issue and CD. We are excited to work on this upcoming issue and use it as an opportunity to ground ourselves with past strategy and tactics, celebrations of wins, and reflections on where we are going from here. We are accepting submissions for the issue through the end of April, and you can also submit art to us for our upcoming online art auction! Email collective@earthfirstjournal.org for details, and keep checking the Newswire for updates and other ways to plug in.
Luckily, our past year in Oregon has been a good one for the Journal. We’ve had more volunteers, expanded our prisoner subscription base, regularly published the magazine and interacted with our community and surroundings more. We’ve gotten our website back up and have exciting projects coming up in the next 6 months (that we are all working on from our respective homes). But we still need your help to stay on track.
So although we won’t be sending out letters or prizes or having as splashy a fundraiser as originally planned, we are still asking for and appreciate anything you can share to keep this small radical media project going.
We would also love to use this time to amplify the direct action people are doing in the face of this disaster-from sharing food and supplies to caring for each other’s mental health to creative resistance against prisons and in defense of the wild. If you have a direct action project you want people to know about, let us know-we want to spread the word. Rad communities and individuals all over the world are supporting each other (from a safe distance) and figuring out what mutual aid looks like in this unprecedented moment. We hope you are able to feel this global resistance and community support and that it helps you keep going right now.
Thanks for inspiring us from afar, and thank you for your support of the Journal!
Earth First! Journal Collective