Kopkind Colony

A red sun at night, meteorologists say, signals high pressure and pleasant days ahead. ‘Red sky at night a sailor’s delight’ and all that. That red sun from the vista where Kopkind convenes signifies pressure, for sure; as for pleasant weather, sociopolitically speaking, that’s something that people have always had to imagine and strive to realize.

Kopkind’s summer project turned 25 this year. Twenty-five years of bringing together left journalists, activists and filmmakers, and providing a space for people to ‘dream, dream big’, as one of our participants once said; to analyze the contemporary situation, learn together, think together, imagine paths forward and strategies to get there. And, along the way, to breathe, to recharge. To take pleasure in the good that life, nature, art and camaraderie have to offer. To remember history, its numberless named and unnamed people who have always had to fight, who faced times far harder than ours and sought to make a world fit to live in.

At Kopkind we’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to this project over the years with their time, their ideas, their donations, their words and images, knowledge and experience, their force of personality and generosity of spirit, their physical labor, their challenging questions, their social memory, their ability to create moments of profound collective insight and joy. We all will need such gifts — and spaces to share them and more — going forward. It’s not going to be an easy time. It never has been easy. And the pressures aren’t just national and global; they’re on us individually and organizationally.

So here comes the money part. Whether Giving Tuesday or Giving Anyday, this project needs you. Please help Kopkind continue to help the organizers, the writers, the mediamakers and sensemakers, the researchers, the artists, the thinkers and doers, defenders and troublemakers, workers all, as we strive with others for that better day. Thank you, with urgency and commitment.

In this, Kopkind’s 25th year, whether you can give $25 or $250 or $2500 or anything in between, please hit the Donate button in the top bar here; or, if you wish to write a check, please make it payable to Kopkind and send c/o JoAnn Wypijewski, 356 East 13th Street #11, New York, NY 10003. All gifts to Kopkind are tax deductible to the full exent allowable by law.

We leave you here with one more picture because, when words aren’t fully adequate, nature reminds us that even as night bears down, there will be light.