August 15, 2020 Carnegie Newsletter

Page 1

NEWSLETTER

'

carnnews@vcn,bc.C8

401 Main Street Vancouver Canada V6A 2T7

(604) 665~2289

34 Years. This issue marks 34 years of publication negie Newsletter.

for the Car-

It began with an ex-city editor for a

Toronto daily who was working on an Unemployment Insurance Top-up Program. He walked around Carnegie saying "I'm AI and I'm starting a newsletter.

Can you

help?" A piece of poetry, a story about the Seniors, a continuing coverage of in-house controversy

regarding the

Board of Directors, an appeal for contributions

..,

AI was here for the first 7 issues, twic-e a month through

mid-November,

For the few contributors

then his UI ran out and he left, it appeared doable so we car-

ried on with the established format & the Carnegie Newsletter continued. There has seldom been a want of content the writers and poets give of themselves

Most of

in very per-

sonal and revealing pieces, what life has done to make certain experiences visceral and necessary to share, Basic guidelines

include, to this day, no racism, sexism,

personal attacks, or libel; with the balance insisted on in Journalism

101 somewhat

modified,

If the corporate

media wants to provide a token comment

from "the

left" it is usually presented in a way to diminish such views, The Newsletter has never made a great effort to include the views of the 1%. Coverage of stuff affecting the vast majority 'ginalised

of mar-

people includes housing & homelessness,

poverty, welfare, the drug trade, sex trade, "free"

trade, Indigenous rights and responsibilities, gentrification,

land use,

overdoses & safe supply, street safety,

missing & murdered

women, food security, gangs & vio-

lence, local festivals and gatherings

and cleansing and

solidarity. The life of the Downtown

Eastside has been expressed

in a myriad of ways as people found an honest venue for their writing and art. In 2001 a grant was obtained through

PEACH (Partners in Economic and Community

Help) to make a book of some of the best writing

and

poetry published during the first 15 years of the Newsletter. There was controversy

(of course) as almost all

the middle-class and upper-middle

class people on this

body had problems with the points of view being expressed, They had lawyers go through the proposed content and affix stickies on problematic

vitriol. The chair-

person of PEACH held a raucous meeting and said, "All of this has already been published!" One article got almost universal condemnation:

it listed information

lic sources on how much various individuals'

from pubproperties

had increased in value in one year. In a community


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