Dear Friends,
Two years ago, the Lucy Parsons Center collective wrote asking for support
to help us maintain the nuts-and-bolts of the center. Today, we're writing
you with a new idea - a major task for our all-volunteer collective, but
one that is essential if we are to sustain the Lucy Parsons Center as a
mainstay of radical activism in the Boston area.
We want to buy a building, and we need everyone's help to do it.
The Lucy Parsons Center (formerly the RedBook Store) has been an
outstanding center of activism in Boston, providing a venue for education,
discussion and reflection, depending on no political or ideological group
as its patron, and always maintaining its non-sectarian radical character.
Over the past thirty years, however, we've existed precariously. After a
number of RedBook moves in Cambridge and then Jamaica Plain, the Lucy
Parsons Center was founded in 1992 as a successor organization. But after
four successful years in Central Square, Cambridge came the end of rent
control in Boston and Cambridge, and the surge in real estate speculation
and rents that followed have made maintaining the bookstore and Center a
real cliff-hanger at times.
Today, the Lucy Parsons Center finally has a big, open space on Columbus
Avenue in Boston's South End, with well-stocked shelves, room for many
activist groups to meet, speakers, movies and other events on a weekly
basis, free open-source computers for public access, space for posters,
flyers, and announcements from a host of groups, but with near-suffocating
costs for our all-volunteer collective: well over $2,000 per month with
rent and utilities.
So the Lucy Parsons collective has embarked upon the purchase of a building
- with a committee to oversee the process and a "building fund" which
contains the beginnings of a downpayment. We need everyone's financial
support to make this purchase a reality - our goal is to raise nearly
$300,000 by April 2004, and we are slowly getting there. Right now, we need
everyone who believes in the Lucy Parsons Center to contribute.
Please make a donation - of $50, $100 or $1,000, whatever you can manage -
which will go directly into our "building fund" for the purchase of a space
that will serve as the bookstore as well as meeting space for other groups,
a movie house, a caf�, a lending library, a children's space, and hopefully
long-term office/organizing space for other activist groups throughout
Boston. No one at Lucy Parsons draws a salary, there are no stock options,
but we're in it for the long haul. And we need your support now.
We count ourselves as one of thousands of groups that dare to create a
world where the free exchange of information and ideas is essential, where
activism against the powerful political and economic structures must be
constant, and where people are free to propose and develop alternatives to
the existing power structures without fear. These ideas fly in the face of
the numbing terror that the government and corporate mass media have been
trying to promote as a "war emergency" to frighten all of us into silence
and acquiescence.
Join with us. Help us make a permanent home for the Lucy Parsons Center.
With thanks & solidarity,
Members of the Lucy Parsons Center collective
You can contribute by credit card by clicking on the link below or by
mailing your check to:
The Lucy Parsons Center Building Fund, 549 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
"Donate via PayPal
