Give the gift of The Volcano this holiday season!
Introducing a 3-tier donations platform with year-round subscription rewards
With 2018 fast ending and 2019 just around the corner, we at The Volcano are plotting the next year with some trepidation. We are, after all, activists and organizers as well as editors and writers, and in this last year the work of organizing has sometimes overwhelmed our capacity to publish. We are also all workers in jobs outside our organizing and publishing, so we have felt our time and energy strain against the publishing we feel is needed.
Reflecting on the last year, we’re redoubling our commitment to The Volcano as a tool for organizing and a space for thinking. In 2019 you can expect more social movement journalism coverage of news and events (including things happening in communities outside the hothouse of western Canada) as well as more research and theory work – and you can expect that this work will be regularly print published and distributed in person and, for the first time, delivered to you through the mail.
To make this possible, we’re asking you to make a sustaining donation as part of your holiday gift giving – now on our new Patreon fundraising platform.
Reporting and thinking
We feel that we did some excellent publishing in 2018 (our year-end round-up is coming soon) and began featuring more formally diverse writing. We want to continue publishing coverage of news and events from the perspective of activists who are dedicated to making news and events, which we refer to as “social movement journalism,” and we also want to publish longer-form research and theory work.
In 2019 we will focus on increasing the frequency and breadth of coverage of our social movement journalism by making these stories briefer and more focused on reporting. We will release two distinct pages for our website in order to make it easier to navigate quick news item reports and to find the valuable longer investigative, research, and theory articles that have more enduring use.
On the streets, not just online
Most of the publishing we did in 2018 was online. But we did a lot more print publishing work than it might seem. We published two print newspapers and more than a dozen newsletters in the new “Volcano Family” of focused community newsletters, including the Whalley Window in Surrey; the We Won’t Go Newsletter in Burnaby; Bread Roses and Hormones newsletter distributed to trans and queer communities throughout Metro Vancouver; and Anita’s News in Maple Ridge. After six years of experience publishing online and in print, we are convinced that print publishing is not only not dead, it is the most effective way to close the information divide between the online world and the low-income, Indigenous, immigrant, homeless, informally educated communities that are structurally excluded from an increasingly digitally-oriented public sphere.
In 2019 we are committed to publishing The Volcano print newspaper 10 out of 12 months – we plan to take August and December off from publishing to give ourselves a break. Our print run of 4,000 newspapers costs about $600 and is enough to distribute throughout the Fraser Valley and Southern Vancouver Island, with some making it into the interior. We also plan to print booklets with thematic collections of articles and some long-form theory articles. These booklets will be sold at cost, and the money will go back into printing; your donations will help kickstart this project.
What you get for donating to the Volcano
To support our publishing plan for 2019 (and to give us the incentive to stick to it!) we are rolling out a donations bundle. For each of these subscription options, include a mailing address with your donation information.
*A note on currencies and how to donate: We are located in Canada but, unfortunately, Patreon is US dollars only, so we have calculated a rough conversion into the amounts in the Patreon links. If you’re using Patreon, the amount for $10/mth will show up on Patreon as $7.50. You’re welcome to increase this amount! The Paypal payments are in Canadian dollars. If you want to give a one-time donation it is easier to use Paypal. You can also send us a cheque to The Volcano, CCEC Credit Union / 2248 Commercial Drive / Vancouver BC V5N 4B5
Volcano bundle #1: Tectonic subscription! Receive The Volcano by mail
Make a sustaining donation of $10 to $20 a month or a 1-time donation of $100 to $200 and receive a year’s subscription of 2 copies of each Volcano newspaper delivered to your door.
You get one newspaper for yourself, and a second one to leave at a coffee shop or library near you.
Give a Tectonic subscription through patreon
Give a Tectonic subscription through paypal
Volcano bundle #2: Magma subscription! The Volcano delivered to your door plus all 2019 booklets
Make a sustaining donation of $30 to $40 a month or a 1-time donation of $300 to $400 and receive a year’s subscription of 2 copies of each Volcano delivered to your door plus every booklet we publish in 2019.
There is a bit of a wildcard in this bundle because we don’t know how many booklets we will publish. It could be 3 or it could be 10, but it will probably be somewhere in between.
give a magma subscription through patreon
give a magma subscription through paypal
Volcano bundle #3: Volcanic subscription! The Volcano and booklets plus kitch!
Make a sustaining donation of $50 to $100/month (or more!) or a 1-time donation of $500 to $1,000 (or more!) and get everything. You’ll get 2 copies of every issue, plus every booklet, and all the merchandise we make – yes we’re planning to roll out stickers, cards, buttons, and shirts this year (our self-promotions have been lacking so far) – and you’ll get it all.
Like bundle 2, this is also a wildcard because we can’t promise how much merchandise we’ll make (it certainly won’t be tons) but, regardless, you will for sure feel good that you’re underwriting our publishing work in such a solid and valued way!
give a volcanic subscription through patreon
give a volcanic subscription through paypal
December donor bonus!
If you purchase any of these three bundles before December 20th, we will send a holiday card and a package of our published materials from 2018, including our newspapers and a selection of Volcano Family newsletters, to you or gift wrapped for the person you’re purchasing the bundle for.
There’s no geographic border to this offer – because the cost is a donation not the cost of printing, it’s the same price (in Canadian dollars) for anywhere in the world. But we warn you that the further away you are, the more copies we’ll send you and the more our expectation will be that you distribute them in your community!
That’s our pitch, please pass it on to your friends. Onwards!
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