Target reached!
If you good people are extra generous and extra outgoing in sharing this crowdfunder...
If you good people are extra generous and extra outgoing in sharing this crowdfunder...
We want to buy printing equipment so the party and other local groups can produce newsletters and leaflets in a cheap and eco-friendly way
We're looking for £1750 to buy a secondhand Riso printer and a folding machine. A Riso is like a big photocopier - it does high-volume printing for pennies a copy. In the long run, it'll save us tons of money and allow us to be more efficient with our volunteers' time - so we can do more useful stuff in the community.
And potentially allow other community and voluntary groups to enjoy the same cheap convenient printing that they used to get at the Turkish Baths in Friars Walk. But first things first...
Local politics is basically all about newsletters. Lots and lots of newsletters. Even with Facebook and Twitter, printed material delivered door-to-door is our most effective way of communicating with local residents.
The vast majority of the money we receive in donations is spent on printing newsletters and leaflets to tell people about the work of our splendid District and Town councillors and share our vision of a just and flourishing society, living sustainably within environmental limits.
But printing is expensive. Especially when you have a policy of only using 100% recycled paper and vegetable-based inks. We use a very good local printing firm, but even their best price to produce an A3 newsletter for one council ward (2,500 households) is £300.
To put that in context, if we produced a quarterly newsletter for the whole of Lewes, it would cost about £2000 a year.
That's basically why we don't do it!
In true Green style, we want to do more with less. Less money, mainly. With our own riso printer, we could do newsletters for a third of the cost - for A3, that's 4p a sheet instead of 13p.
If we can cut our printing costs this dramatically, we can reach more people, more frequently, with the same amount of money. Or we can spend that money, generously donated by our regular supporters, on a wider range of projects. Other than newsletters...
But we don't want to keep such a useful bit of kit to ourselves. Many local groups mourned the closure of the Lewes Print Room at the old Turkish Baths in Friars Walk - this council-run facility allowed small voluntary and community groups to print off their members' newsletters and other bumf at an affordable rate. Now that it's closed and moved to Eastbourne, it's been sorely missed - but if we can get to grips with this new machine, and find somewhere accessible and sustainable to house it (ie. not in a volunteer's garage!) we can make it available for other groups to use, for a very small fee, which can then be reinvested in other activities.
So please - if you can make a modest investment of £50 in our capacity to spread a positive Green message in our area, and multiply that across dozens of small, cash-strapped clubs and groups that knit together the fabric of Lewes society, you and us in the Green Party will see a very handsome return.
We just hope you don't mind if we ignore your 'No Junk Mail' sticker...
This project successfully funded on 30th March 2017