The Slingshot Collective is an all-volunteer collective that has been making media in the utopian margins since 1988, producing a zine/newspaper that elevates the voices of freegans, radical squatters, guerrilla gardeners, prisoners, sex workers, punk rockers, bossless workplace organizers, abuse survivors, tree-sitters, protestors, and others who aim to co-create “the better” through a diversity of tactics that include boycotts, blockades, articulations of harm, marches, shows, occupations, and the efforts to (re)create everyday relations that preclude and radically eject logics of oppression and unnecessary hierarchy. The Slingshot Collective also produces an annual day planner that is sold to fund the newspaper’s free distribution to over 30,000 readers across the globe, with free subscriptions to low-income folks and prisoners.

Harlin/Hayley Steele has been part of the Slingshot Collective since 2011, and their work has included training new volunteers, making promotional materials, writing articles and essays, providing editorial feedback to other writers, taking photos, creating visual art, organizing events, and designing page layout and posters for the Slingshot zine and day planner. Prior to “running away and joining the movement,” Harlin/Hayley served in various positions in literary publishing and interned at a few news outlets, including a stint with McSweeney’s & KATU Channel 2 News in Portland. They hold an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Portland State University. More about Steele’s involvement in editing & publishing can be found on their CV.

Various issues of Slingshot 2011-2018.

Members of the Slingshot Collective reviewing each page in a consensus meeting hours before going to print,c. 2013. (photo by Steele)

Inside the pages of Slingshot, various issues 2011-2018.

Steele taking photos for Slingshot.

New Issue Call to Action made by Steele.

Making art for Slingshot. (photo by Steele)

Layout and art by Steele, c. 2017.

Slingshot Cover from 2013.

Front pages of various issues of Slingshot from 2011-2018.

Slingshot cover from 2013.

Slingshot celebrated 30 years in 2018.

Making slingshot, c. 2015. (photo by Steele)

Making Slingshot, c. 2018. (photo by Steele)

Slingshot Collective at the Apple Farm Commune, c. 2011.

Forged during the struggle known as the Second Wave of People’s Park Riots in Berkeley in 1988, the the Slingshot Collective draws inspiration from People’s Park, as well as from co-op housing culture, to develop a unique media-making process that merges user-development and consensus, aspiring towards leaderlessness.  The collective also uses analog printing techniques, with layout still being done by hand with hot wax and scissors like it’s 1979.