Zine Making Workshop for Mutual Aid Resources in Our Community

Name: Zine Making Workshop for Mutual Aid Resources in Our Community
Start: 2025-01-21T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-01-21T22:00:00-05:00
Location: 2021 E Michigan Ave, Lansing, MI 48912-3011, United States

Schedule

Tue Jan 21 2025 at 07:00 pm to 10:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

2021 E Michigan Ave, Lansing, MI 48912-3011, United States | Lansing, MI

Come join us at The Avenue where local artist and activist Rosalarian will be showing folks how to make zines!
The day after the inauguration, we're for sure going to be sad and mad and a lot of other powerful emotions. Let's take that energy and use it for something. Let's organize something for the community to help each other. Mutual aid is not just about giving money to people. There are a lot of resources we can share with each other, and a big one is knowledge. Let's help each other survive by sharing what we know in the form of zines.
There are many methods for making a zine (pronounced "zeen"), which we will go over. Zines are cheap to make and easy to distribute, making it an ideal way to spread information. People have been making these for decades as part of DIY/punk movements, and we're going to continue that tradition. The goal is to be able to distribute these for free in our communities in a way that anyone can access them.
We will discuss how to think of a topic for your zine. Even if you don't think you have any skills to share, you most certainly do. Can you cook? Grow food? Sew? Do you know how to get through a phone tree until you can talk to a human? What seems easy to you might be hard for someone else, and your knowledge could help out a lot.
Some people might be making zines on their own, but I encourage people to team up and combine efforts. I want our zines to contain specific resources for our communities, not just how to do something, but where to go and who to talk to in whatever community you live in. (This is based in Lansing, but I know people are coming from other cities as well.) So if you've got a topic in mind already, look into what specific resources there are in your town that you can share.
Not all zines have art in them, but we can discuss how to make them visually interesting and arrange information in ways that are easy to read. I also encourage teams of writers and artists working together.
This will be a long term process that will go beyond these few hours on this one night. I encourage you to join our group so you can keep collaborating with others working towards these same goals. ALSO: there's going to be a Lansing Zine Fest this year. We are not affiliated with them, but it's going to be around if you want to get involved in the larger zine scene.
The venue is 21+. It is a bar, but as someone who doesn't drink, they're pretty NA friendly. In the future, we hope to find a venue that can accommodate the younger crowd. This is the first step in a long campaign.
Rosalarian has been making comics and zines for over 20 years as an artist and writer, instructing at the International School of Comics in Chicago. They also own a small indie shop that sells comics and zines. They intend to have a whole section of free zines full of vital resources, and they intend to collaborate with other community spaces to have copies as well.