3/13/2024

Support our community space through times of change!

Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer, or making a one time donation, and maybe encouraging a friend to do the same.

We are expecting some major organizational changes in the coming months: The Pioneer Valley Worker’s Center will no longer be subleasing the space on 4th street, and they will be discontinuing their monthly food distribution in May of this year. Their last distro will be May 17th. We are aware of the major impact this will have on folks who rely on the food distro for pantry staples and fresh foods for their families. It is a huge loss to our community!

This also means that the costs for rent, utilities, and wifi will dramatically increase for Finders and Great Falls Books through Bars, which are both run entirely on volunteer efforts, a few micro-grants, and crowd-funding.

We’ve enjoyed sharing this storefront with the folks from PVWC and we really appreciate all the work that went into making the food distro happen! We are hoping to connect with other programs and resources so that we can still access and provide free, nutritious, and delicious foods for our community moving forward. If you know of a project that focuses on producing or distributing food for free, we want to hear from you!

We will need to make up for a significant source of funding in order to pay the rent for our storefront, and make other awesome things happen here!

This is possible. And you can help! If just 50 more folks contributed $10 a month to our givebutter, this could secure rent for both GFBTB and the Finders Collective for the next year!

Additionally, if you have ideas for fundraising, events and benefits shows, you can reach out to us, and that means a lot too.

Thank you, dear friends, for your continued support of this project and all the endeavors which take place at our community center on 4th street.

Whether you have volunteered during open hours, if you’ve hosted or attended an event in our space, donated to the free store, shared our fliers, or made a financial contribution to our fundraising campaign, you are a part of what makes this all possible.

As a reminder: We have open hours Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 3-6pm, during which you can visit the free store, check out books from our library, or just drop-in and hang out! We would love to see you there. Stay tuned for more events and projects in the works... a seed swap, film screenings, our tool library, and more!

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6/2023

Hello friends! We've pulled this off for about a year with thanks to something of an angel investor, which has been unbelievable - we really lucked out finding a wheelchair accessible downtown storefront with a large basement and patio, within walking distance of the river and several community gardens.

You can count on us to continue facilitating this awesome experiment, and we're depending on our friends to make our further endeavors possible. Will you help us grow spaces and practices of solidarity and mutual support? We're just beginning to see what having a place like this can do to help us find each other, survive, and transform this world - and it feels exciting.

We've had around 70 to 100 visitors a week to the free store/library since opening 3 days a week. At the same time, Books Through Bars is sending 1200+ packages/year to prisoners, and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center is continuing monthly food distributions to farm workers and the community in general. We're also regularly hosting various meetings and events (and you could book the space for an event if you want to, also).

It's been so cool to have well over 1000 visits (as of mid April) from people of all ages since we started hosting open hours in October 2022. In March, we increased our open hours from once a week to three days a week. We've been really excited to create an infrastructure for sharing and solidarity through our store, library, outdoor fridge, public computer, accessible space, and free book shelf on the porch, and it's working! It’s really awesome to see both how surprised and touched folks can feel to be able to take things for free, and how natural it feels to be able to take and leave stuff without any bureaucracy or money in the way.

Lots of people have gotten books, food, toys, soap, records, art and craft supplies, clothes, kitchen equipment, musical instruments and other odds and ends during that time. It’s especially cool to see younger folks getting to interact with all of these things as something other than commodities, and it’ll be interesting to see if that changes how they (or any of us) think about the world.

We've also hosted lots of events this past year, including a daylong skill share, trick or treating, talks and discussions, movie nights, a utopian fiction reading group, a writing workshop, a menstrual cycle tracking workshop, and letter writing nights for political prisoners. Much more is still in the works for the coming months!

Come check out the free store, see if there’s anything nice in the public refrigerator, or hang out in a comfortable chair. Check out our amazing library and get a borrowing card if you haven’t already. There are a lot of fascinating books on history, politics, sustainable farming, building, DIY skills, social issues, fiction, poetry, and kids books: a collection that you might not find all in one place anywhere else. We’re open Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 3-6, Great Falls Books Through Bars hosts book packing days for prisoners on every second Saturday from 1-5, and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center holds free food distributions every third Friday.

We know times are tight for a lot of us, but we believe that we can all continue to get a lot out of this community space if we spread out the cost among us. In a colonial capitalist society whose operating principles have led to untold cruelty and climate catastrophe, we feel like it’s really important to nurture an alternative vision of how to exist as a human that's based in solidarity and getting to know each other again. Sharing stuff is fun and helpful, but it's the relationships we're building that will really carry us through an unknown future.

While we are certainly open to large donations, it is important to us to stay grassroots funded by neighbors, friends, and each other.

We've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible here.

Please consider being a monthly sustainer, and maybe encouraging a friend to do the same. Could you spare $10 a month? $5? $2? Fifty-five of our friends sharing $10/month would cover the rent for the entirely volunteer-run Finders and Books Through Bars collectives, and keep this place open for everyone. A lot of people helping a little = enough.

Love,
The Finders Collective

Please be part of keeping our storefront open as an awesome collaborative space of mutual aid and community building!

Please help us pay rent so we can continue to grow as a hub for mutual aid in Great Falls