Every season the Volcano produces a print newspaper. Members of our all-volunteer editorial collective take time away from our work of organizing community fightbacks against gentrification, the displacement of homeless and low income people, drug prohibition, and Canada’s dispossession of Indigenous nations’ lands to produce a full 24-page tabloid newspaper.
Publishing means that we find writers who will produce critical content for free, support some who don’t have much publishing experience, edit the work submitted, do a heck of a lot of writing ourselves, and design and lay the whole thing out. Then we send it to the printers, pick up the 8,000 copies, and begin distributing them through networks of supporters throughout Southern BC (and send some up with Unist’ot’en voyages to the north too). This is a lot of work, but the feedback we get from low-income communities – that they see their voices and interests reflected in these pages like nowhere else – makes it all worthwhile.
We believe the Volcano newspaper makes an important contribution to our community struggles by amplifying the voices and experiences of people on the front lines of the most important community struggles in western Canada. Our pages carry the voices of affected communities alongside the experiences, reflections, and ideas of organizers who support these community struggles from anti-capitalist and anti-colonial political perspectives. The mix of these perspectives – the experiential with radical theory – produces the same electric and transformative political dynamics that give our movements life in the streets.
The theme of the winter 2016-17 issue of the Volcano will be “breaking unjust laws to survive.” We will be reflecting on different struggles that we are supporting throughout BC, looking at the ways community needs are coming up against Canadian legal systems, and thinking about what it will take to build enough force to overcome these laws as the obstacles to social justice that they are.
Our editorial collective is able to do a lot of the work of producing this newspaper, but our strength of independence from foundation funding and business advertising revenue is also potentially our weakness… if our supporters don’t step up. This week’s online Volcano newsletter is being preempted with a call for donations to support the upcoming print newspaper.
We need $1,200 to print the 8,000 copies of our newspaper. We need $4,800 to print every issue of the paper in 2017. If we can raise the full amount that we need for this year then we will be able to dream bigger – of printing more often, of printing more special issues and pamphlets, and of (gasp!) paying some writers to take on some investigative journalist work. Please consider contributing one big donation or a smaller monthly donation throughout the whole year. Follow this link to our donations page, and support social movement journalism.