Help me get my zine collection for my library up!

[Laurathelorax]

Hey everyone, I'm starting a zine library in Providence RI. Providence is a really artsy and good community for this, and I live there and am a zine maker! Yay! I have most likely already found an interim place to house my zine library collection. It's going to be called "Use Your Words" Zine Library and I'm really excited. We're also going to have a high school after school/summer program for creating zines as it's important for me to give back in that way since I got into zines in a really big way starting when I was in high school.

 

If you'd like to send zines as a donation for this purpose, please send me a private message, and comment here with any further questions or ideas! Any advice from those who have started non profit organizations, businesses, distros, shops, etc are greatly appreciated as I have little idea of what I'm doing after I move on from the interim house of the library.

 

As it stands I'll be in a community space for a while, but my dream is to eventually have a storefront for it and be the director of the after school program and non profit (and thus have a small amount of income generated from it, enough to survive so I can devote most my time to it).

 

Thanks!

Laura aka Lauralorax

[Laurathelorax]

YAY we officially have a space! It's looking like it will be a long term partnership, too!

I don't want to give out the address since everything is essentially not ready to be visited yet, but we definitely have a concrete building to keep the zines in!

[Erica S.]

Hey, I tried to send you a personal message but Ning said we have to be friends first. But I would like to send you copies of my zine and my husband's zine! Send an email to blacklightdiner at gmail dot com, and good luck with the library.

[Chris Sitko]

Can the zines be from anywhere? 'Cause I don't live in RI,

[Laurathelorax]

yes they can!

[Joe Wallace]

Just wanted to show you this--there's a similar version of what you're planning for RI is running quite successfully in Chicago, even though it's not specifically zine-centric they do focus on creative writing for local kids and http://www.826chi.org/ might be a cool source of inspiration--especially with their most excellent fundraising arm, The Boring Store, which calls itself "not a secret agent store". Their storefront is VERY cool and fun to browse in person and the online version is fun too: http://www.notasecretagentstore.com/

just wanted to let you know your idea definitely has a successful precedent--you're onto something really cool here!

 

Joe

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