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Spheres of Influence is fundraising! Please consider donating to our Kickstarter campaign and help us raise $5,000 by November 8th to hire a web designer and cover basic operational expenses so we can keep running for another year.
A couple of weeks ago, Spheres of Influence celebrated its first birthday! It’s been an eventful year, to say the least, and we are so grateful to our readers and everyone who has supported us along the way. In the past year, we became a registered non-profit, hired 70 incredible volunteers, published 220 articles, engaged thousands of readers from 64 countries across the globe, and held two large advocacy events raising awareness of Uyghur and Palestinian human rights abuses.
My good friend Lilly Callender and I began creating Spheres of Influence in the summer of 2020 after graduating from university at the onset of the global pandemic. Grappling with so much uncertainty and navigating the worst job market since the Great Depression, we wanted to build an opportunity for ourselves and others in similar positions to contribute to something meaningful.
We launched Spheres of Influence with two primary intentions. Our first was to combat the ways in which mainstream global reporting tends to cover the same stories over and over again while completely overlooking others. We wanted to serve as a platform that sheds light on underreported issues and approaches topics from a decolonial lens, with the hope of drawing greater attention to certain crises that might later impact policy.
Our second intention was to create opportunities for young people in Canada and across the globe to gain meaningful experience in journalism, editing, marketing, and more in light of the pandemic and systemic barriers in the job market. In doing so, we aim to amplify marginalized voices and create capacity-building opportunities for our volunteers.
We’ve managed to do all of this on a very minimal budget. But there’s a lot more we want to do, from revamping our website to starting a membership program. We also hope to soon be able to pay our staff for their hard work, as we are entirely volunteer-based. So, we are humbly asking you, our wonderful readers, for a bit of financial support so that we can cover some operational expenses and hire a web designer.
Given the complex global challenges we’re facing today and the growing distrust in mainstream media, it’s now more important than ever to support independent news platforms like Spheres of Influence.
