These past few weeks have been intense and wonderful all at the same time. We had a conversation with everybody putting together LoD and published the event online, we gave talks in Germany, Austria and Slovakia and we filmed stuff with Michal Kolesar and his team.
You folks are already aware of our workshop project and know how it works; people contact us wanting to organise a talk, we try and fit it in the calendar and with the help of local humans a venue is found and promotion is done and we spend a few hours talking about whatever the fuck people want to talk about. Pretty simple isn’t it? We put a pot out for donations, but the workshops are ALWAYS free. We tend to always lose money on those talks, but we do not care, education should always be free.
What you might not know is how we are operating in relation to the microdocumentaries we are filming. The idea is simple, we find people that are not normally in the spotlight but that are doing awesome work and we work with them to tell their story via video. The aim is to publish one every six weeks, but we will see how it actually develops. At the moment we have two episodes of the series that we are working on, one of Michal Kolesar and his team and another one on Kent Animal Defenders. We do not know when we will be able to start releasing the project, but we are putting a lot of effort into creating something that is educational and inspiring, so others feel empowered to also take action whilst learning from folks who are at it already.
In the next few days we are going to bring you a few posts on arrest support and prison support as because we’ve been very busy it has been a little more difficult to get them sorted. And that, really, brings us to the main point of this post.
Throughout the past three years, we’ve had three main focus points as a collective; educating the public, bringing direct action news to social media and doing prison and arrest support. We used to have a lot more support when we started, and slow and steady that has gone down. In fact, we send HALF the amount of money to prisoners than we used to send just a year ago. And there is more and more actions were folks are being arrested and we are struggling to help with fines.
We have tried producing different merch, doing discounted merchandise (on items where people can already choose how much they pay), we plaster Patreon and PayPal in many posts… But the reality is, we must be doing something wrong, because it isn’t working. We do not do this job for the money. None of us in fact gets any money for their personal life out of Unoffensive. We don’t have wages or buy food or clothes or pay rent with the money from the collective.
So we are struggling and we fail to see why. We can imagine that many of the folks who used to support us a couple of years ago have grown towards the mentality of “support sanctuaries not individuals” and we also believe that concept to be true. What we don’t think to be true is that Unoffensive falls under the “waged full time activist” that people are avoiding to fund. In fact, different people from the collective do different things to survive, and none of us have a wage from Unoffensive.
So it would be wonderful if you could tell us what we could change to make things better. Should we be posting more content? Or more diverse stuff? Should we be trying to reach out to bigger platforms that might be able to help us out with promotion? How can we convince *just* a 10% of our followers to drop ONE dollar a month on Patreon? Whatever it is, we are open to criticism and to learning more because we would not want the project to die out.
For anyone interested, our PayPal address is unoffensive_animal(at)tutanota(dot)com and our patreon is:
www.patreon.com/animalliberation
See you in the next riot
UA.
