To whom it may concern,
As you may or may not have already heard, Freedom Press is in some difficulty, both financial and in terms of volunteer labour – basically we need you.
As part of getting our act together to deal with these problems we are proposing to have a series of public meetings where you ask any questions you may have and discuss how we can drag the paper, the bookshop, the publishing house and the building out of trouble.
If you are part of a sympathetic group, we would like you to send a delegate or, if you won’t be meeting in time to discuss this letter before the 12th, an unofficial observer to help us in putting together our plan of action and suggest where support can be found. As an individual we would like you to come along and find out a bit more – you can even volunteer on the spot if you have the time!
The first of these meetings will be on Sunday, August 12th from 3pm at the London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES. We’ll be doing a short presentation and Q&A to hopefully answer any questions you might have about our situation, followed by discussion. Below is a tentative agenda:
Intro presentation [5-10 minutes]
On the building, what it does, why it's important, how the various parts of Freedom interact, explaining the financial situation and talking about the newspaper.
Discussion for wider community [Half hour to an hour]
- Ideas: Proposals for financial and journalistic activity for the next year
- Schedule: Explaining a basic plan of what we'll be needing over the course of the next year and when, including activity and finances
- Relaunch: Explaining a basic plan for content changes and discussing the October issue as a "relaunch" issue
- Action: Asking directly who is prepared to put time into helping specifically as editors and on distro/marketing/admin
The meeting will then formally end, with any volunteers being asked to stay for a further half hour, in which we’ll flesh out ideas, allocate roles, look at the requirements for next year and plan to meet them, and if we have the numbers, firm up an editorial meeting.
We look forward to seeing you on the 12th, but if you can’t make it we will be holding another meeting in September for non-attendees, and our main meeting where hopefully we will be able to unveil a full plan of action with your help, gain any support we still need - or announce our timeline for failure if everything's gone hideously wrong – will be at the Anarchist Bookfair on October 27th.
Regards,
The Freedom Collective
Comments
Won't be able to make it but
Won't be able to make it but keep us poste don what sort of stuff you need.
Thread about how Freedom must
Thread about how Freedom must be saved: 147 posts. Thread about saving Freedom...
I'll be going down as a
I'll be going down as a delegate for Leeds AF. We discussed this at our meeting today and we're going to try and get the local radical bookshop and social centre/pub coop to take bundles.
~J.
the button wrote: Thread
the button
Not really: thread about saving Freedom, 147 posts (some of which are more about how to get back at Whatsisname). Thread about a meeting in London: 3 posts.
Most of us aren't in London, so most of us won't be going. It's good that Leeds AF are sending someone though.
Some of us made a lot of suggestions in the other thread and have been trying to organise things in our locales for weeks. The relevance of those to a thread about a meeting in London that was only announced a few days ago, is questionable. The timing (ie, we were discussing this even before the meeting was announced) makes it difficult to integrate the one into the other.
Bump, as this is tomorrow!
Bump, as this is tomorrow!
How did this go? When I read
How did this go? When I read the last issue I got the impression that the game was pretty much up and no-one cared. OK I'm sure that's not how it really is but it did sound a bit defeatist.
the button
can't find...
EDIT: scratch that, found.
Yeah went okay in the end,
Yeah went okay in the end, got about 25-30 people which was roughly what I was expecting for a lightly-plugged meet on relatively short notice, and several were motivated enough to volunteer something. Only downside is we still don't have a lead editor for August, so will need to call out a bit wider for that I guess. I'll write something more considered later.