Hi friends, it’s been a very full 4 months since we finished up our fundraiser and last wrote to you all. As compensation for how long its been, we’ll start this update with a trailer we’re just now releasing and that we’re *very* excited to share for your viewing pleasure.
We made this one for a grant we applied for. It’s so good to see just a few voices from this series start to come together. We can’t wait to share more. We still have a lot of work ahead of us before the series is released though; something to keep looking forward to in 2025.
This summer has been absurdly busy.
In late April, we hit the road again to make our way north. We took two months to work our way back up to Michigan, filming interviews with Lorenzo Kom’boa and JoNina Abron Ervin, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, Sol Underground, and the DC Migrant Support crew. Along the way, we also worked on flushing out our storyboards and continued to prepare for our editing process.
In July, after being on the road for over a year, we landed back in Ypsilanti, MI. It’s been so good to be back with our people here. We’re still living out of the van for now, but have good support from our community for places to edit, cook, and relax in.
We also made it to the Institute for Social Ecology’s: Social Ecology and the Black Radical Tradition summer intensive. We spent the week filming the presentations, which can be viewed on their YouTube channel. (Here are a couple of our favorites: Black Anarchist Futures, Black Anarchist Legacies.)
In August, we visited the For Everyone Collective in Grand Rapids. For Everyone partnered with the series and offered to print the t-shirts we sold during the fundraiser. Check out a short reel from our time with them:
It was a real pleasure to get to know the collective, and we are very much looking forward to tending that relationship and supporting their work in return. They’re a worker-owned collective of formerly incarcerated people and loved ones of incarcerated people. Their design work is exceptional and all based on their visions of an abolitionist world. They also do design work and printing for social justice efforts and organizations, so if you ever need something printed, please reach out to them!
If you didn’t get a shirt, we unfortunately didn’t print many extras. But, we did print a handful of black hoodies that we’re thinking about raffling away in November. Stay tuned for details.
Along with both of us supporting our families, doing some van upkeep, and making it out to Chicago for an interview with Community Response Works, you can tell we’ve been pretty busy. All the while, we’ve been working through our footage as much as possible.
The money from the spring fundraiser has covered some major expenses up to this point: gas, t-shirt printing and shipping, interviewee stipends, editing software, cloud storage and music royalty subscriptions, and more. We have about half the money left, which, in addition to doing some odd jobs and contract work, will get us through the next phases of editing. Thank y’all again for supporting this work.
This fall we’re really putting our heads down on editing. We have an ambitious timeline we’re working through. We’ll send some more news soon.