It
has always been one of our goals in producing Certain Days to
inspire organizers to keep on fighting. The calendar is an organizing
tool – a fundraiser as well as a medium to spread information – but we
also aim to have it be a reminder that we're in this to win. In trying
to select the theme for this year's edition of Certain Days, we wanted
to focus on this – on the hope and inspiration that is needed to
sustain the often daunting day-to-day work of creating a more just
society.
Grassroots
campaigns – past and present, inside and outside prisons
– provide many, many examples of how we can win, and how in many ways
we already are. Across the continent and around the world people are
building community resources and practices that give a glimpse of the
society we hope to build. This year's edition of Certain Days features
writing and artwork about such local grassroots organizing efforts.
AIDS education, Palestinian solidarity, Indigenous resistance against
the Olympics, and ending violence against women are just some of the
topics that grace these pages. Many of the images were originally
produced as posters or graphics for grassroots campaigns – the art
itself is activism.
As
mentioned above, this calendar is meant to be an organizing tool.
We hope that its content inspires and informs your own work, but
moreover if you have fundraising to do for your campaign(s) we
encourage you to get in touch about distributing the calendar in your
community, and putting the difference between the bulk price and the
cover price back into your own organizing. Groups that have done this
in the past tell us that this has not only help them raise funds, but
allowed them to engage the buyers in a dialogue about the connections
between the work they do and the work of winning freedom for political
prisoners.
We
see strong connections between the struggles inside the prison
walls and those on the outside, between the organizing that landed
political prisoners in prison in the first place and the campaigns to
free them, between prisoner justice work and the many other forms of
justice work discussed in this edition of the calendar. We hope to see
these connections deepened by dialogue and solidarity between the many
movements represented here. There are lessons to be drawn, and
inspiration too.
Enjoy
the calendar, and keep up the good work!
The Certain Days
collective
