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