After just a year of publishing our quarterly print and online newspaper, The Volcano collective is launching a weekly newsletter. Like The Volcano newspaper, this newsletter will be dedicated to covering, boosting, analyzing, and celebrating community struggles against the violent forces of displacement and dispossession in British Columbia, and beyond. With a weekly publishing schedule we hope that we can better contribute to these struggles and lift up the voices of those shut down and shut out of the parades of opulent wealth in this new gilded age.

Over the last year, as each issue of The Volcano has approached we have found it increasingly difficult to cover the ever-increasing number of struggles against displacement and dispossession that demand attention. In the three months that pass between print issues, we activist editors are involved in supporting far more struggles in far more communities than we could possibly cover in a quarterly publication. And while publishing The Volcano has kept far flung communities in more regular contact than we would be otherwise, a more regular publishing project will bring us still closer and more regularly together. Finally, the attacks our low-income and Indigenous communities come under, from the police, politicians, vigilantes, development corporations, and the media are not answered quickly enough with a quarterly-only publication. For all these reasons, we are launching a weekly Volcano newsletter.

The weekly Volcano newsletter will differ from the print publication in a few important ways.

1. The newsletter will be online only. Natalie Knight, our collective’s web designer, has built a website that we are proud of. It is beautiful, easy to navigate, and is fast becoming a hub for community events. We do not have the resources or means to print or distribute a more regular print newspaper, so although access to the internet is severely divided on class, cultural, and colonial lines, we think regular publishing on this website (and with an email newsletter) will still be in line with our mission.

2. The newsletter will focus on immediate, timely news. We hope this will free up space in our quarterly newspaper to focus on broader themes and longer-term problems, the forces we’re facing, and more research and analysis.

3. For the sake of workload for our all-volunteer editorial collective, editing the newsletter is being delegated to one collective member, Ivan Drury. He is responsible for the content and any mistakes in the weekly newsletter. The rest of the collective oversees and directly the overall direction of the newsletter.

The newsletter will mostly consist of original content, and ideally of reports from people in communities themselves. In order to contribute to the newsletter, send an inquiry to newsletter@thevolcano.org