Connecting Through Creativity: The Element Zine
Welcome to the page that’ll get you zany for our zine!
This Spring, we’re crowdfunding for the first time ever. During COVID, Element Young Creatives made tons of art that was imaginative, responsive, relevant, thought-provoking, and straight-up incredible. For a year, COVID has kept us apart. But our creativity has kept us connected.
We reckon you probably used creativity, too, to connect with friends, family, colleagues, peers. It’s been a near universal experience. It’s also been Element’s bread and butter since we started in 2016. Element Young Creatives have used photography, drawing, and words to reflect on the ways creativity keeps us connected. Now we want to share that work with as wide an audience as possible.
Over the past 6 months, Element team has been busy working with four amazing Element Young Creatives and together we have worked on content, design, crowdfunding and marketing to produce our beautiful printed publication.
We’ve collaborated with the amazing Rose from OOMK, an expert in community publishing, and are very excited to reveal a sneak peek into her design process - here’s an exclusive sneak peek revealing just one of many visuals and written pieces that’ll make up the final product ..
Why we need funding
Element projects are commissioned by Local Authorities, and match funded by grants. This zine project is an innovative new idea that isn’t covered by our project funding model. Crowdfunding will cover the costs of youth consultants; zine submissions; Rose’s wizardry with graphic design, printing, packaging and posting out the zines; and providing zines to new Element young people and the professionals who support them.
Ways to Support Element’s Zine
We need your help to turn Element’s zine into a reality. Here’s how you can support us:
Sign up to our newsletter
Receive more zine sneak peaks and be the first to access our zine crowdfunder as soon as it goes live. Scroll to the bottom of this page to add your email.
Pledge to buy a copy (or a few!) of the zine
Filled with beautiful visuals, written articles, poems and creative prompts. We have a range of additional rewards on offer too for higher pledges, including paying zines forward, screen printed Element tote bags, limited edition prints, original artwork, and opportunities to participate in an Element creative session and attend our exclusive meet-the-artists event. Link will go “live” once the crowdfunding page is ready (that’s right, sign up to the newsletter for updates!)
Tell TWO PALS to sign up to our newsletter
We’ve got some amazing supporters, but we realise we’re still a small charity in a big world! That’s why we’re relying on people power to get our zine out there. If everyone who reads this can tell TWO friends/colleagues/peers/lovers to … yep, you’ve got it … sign up to our newsletter, we can spread the word to the best kinda people!
Show us some love on socials
We’ll be previewing some of the art and writing - and shouting a lot about the crowdfunder - on our Twitter and Insta. If you don’t follow us already, click that follow button and plz like and retweet our cool content!
And finally …
You may have seen our videos about the Element project and the Element network. Those were both made in collaboration with filmmaker and photographer Tom Edkins. He has very kindly donated his time and expertise to our crowdfunding campaign, and will be working with the Element Young Creatives to make a short crowdfunding video. This will form the backbone for our crowdfunding page. Today, the team organised the props needed for the video: a huge pencil; a feather boa; sunglasses; flashing cameras … Intrigued? Keep your eyes peeled for the April reveal!