An Update on the State of the Earth First! Journal Office

This has been a gnarly few years for the Journal, and we want to thank all of our supporters for helping us get through some difficult times. With that in mind, we realize we didn’t do a great job of keeping all of our readers updated on our house and office situation. While we thought we were probably losing our house and office early this year, we were definitely losing our minds, and our updates were urgent and sporadic, in tune with your frazzled selves. Now that stuff is secure, we thought we’d let y’all know how we kept the office.

As many of you know, in a last-ditch effort to try and save this property we’ve been at for four years and which was being sold from under us, we put out an urgent request for help. We knew it was ridiculous to think we could raise enough money to actually buy the property in a matter of hours, but we didn’t know what else to do. At the time we made that post, we had one person—a former EF! Journal short-termer—who was interested in buying the property themselves, and would then let us live here, paying rent. However, it wasn’t a sure thing, and they only had about 2/3rds of the price the house was going for and couldn’t do the whole thing. So in desperation, we asked, and y’all answered.

In less than four hours we raised nearly $4,000. It was incredible! But not enough to get anywhere close to helping our one investor buy the property. However, while all you awesome people were donating, we were making last-ditch phone calls to friends and relatives to see if anyone could help. Well, about an hour before we had to go all in or throw in the towel, a current Journal editor’s family member offered to go in on the property with the former short-termer, and pay the last third. They see this as a way to help the Journal, but also as a financial investment for themself: The deal was that the two investors would manage the property, we would pay rent, and they could kick us out any time they wanted, as they plan on selling the property in the future (though they have agreed to give us a good amount of time to get on our feet, and hope they won’t have to sell it until the next group of eco-defenders wants to take the Journal to their bioregion). The other part of the deal was that, while they would help with repairing major infrastructure, such as electrical work, they couldn’t afford to do much more than that, so we would be in charge of doing a lot of the repairs to keep the house in the barely livable condition it was in (which we’d already been trying to do, as the previous owner didn’t do repairs at all).

We took the deal. The house was purchased by two people—a former EF! Journal short-termer and a current editor’s family member—without the help of the donations we received. They also kindly lowered our rent by $50 a month. The money raised through our “Help save our office!” post is being used to make the house livable through home repairs. There were a few people who donated but specified that they only wanted their money going to the purchase of a house, and they were contacted and reimbursed when requested. Inspectors came and checked the house out and gave us a stack of papers telling us about all the things that needed to be fixed, and we prioritized those in order of most vital to least important. So far the home repair money has gone towards sealing a giant crack in an outer wall; replacing the kitchen window; getting a fridge that actually works; repairing the kitchen sink so it stops leaking (temporary fix, this still requires more work); hauling large amounts of debris out of the yard; and putting in smoke detectors.

If you donated and have questions or comments, you know where you can reach us.

Thanks again to everyone who has supported us, whether through donations, offering to invest when we were in a time of need, buying this property, reading and passing along the Journal, sending in pictures or articles, defending the wild in your bioregion, or shouting “Earth First!” in a cop’s face. We love you all.

For the Wild,
The Earth First! Journal Collective