Save Room Magazine: A Fundraiser

SAVE ROOM MAGAZINE: A FUNDRAISER

Room is Canada’s oldest feminist literary magazine, running since 1975. For over 50 years, our small nonprofit has carved out a space in Canadian literary publishing where underrepresented voices can thrive. Three to four times a year, we publish fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, interviews, and book reviews by people of all marginalized genders, including cis and trans women, trans men, nonbinary, and two-spirit people.

Room also makes a special effort to centre BIPOC, queer, and disabled voices, with longstanding partnerships with Indigenous Brilliance ⎯  a collective dedicated to celebrating Indigenous women, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit storytellers ⎯  and Unbound Reading Series, which produces literary events that feature emerging and established Black authors and poets. Room has published issues such as Around the Table: Asian Voices, Indigenous Brilliance, Neurodivergence, and Queer, as well as an ongoing series, Featuring Palestinian Voices. We are staunchly committed to solidarity with global struggles against imperialism and capitalist extraction, and aim to make room for transformative literature. To date, we’ve published over 2,500 writers from marginalized communities, organized over 500 literary events, and published almost 200 issues of our feminist magazine.

The writing and art we publish reflects the diversity of perspectives on our team. Room contributors have been bold, vulnerable, tender, scathing, comedic, mysterious, profound, and more. Our writers, artists, and editors push boundaries of form, genre, tone, subject, and acceptability in their work. We make CanLit a more vibrant place. Room is one of the most integrally diverse spaces in “Canadian” literary publishing today, and we need your help to keep it that way.

Why is Room fundraising?

Room magazine is urgently fundraising to continue running our organization. Our staff have been facing enormous strain since 2025 due to a key staff member’s sudden departure following an extended period of inactivity and sparse communication. This difficult staff transition period required us to pause operations, which included printing issues, processing submissions, applying for grants, reconciling accounts, and conducting other vital operational activities. 

The impacts of this period have been felt significantly across the organization, with the remaining staff taking on large amounts of work that were outside of their job descriptions. We have since subdivided a full-time staff position into three new part-time roles: Circulation Manager, Accounting Coordinator, and Grants Coordinator. We were even able to welcome an Events & Contest Intern with the help of Mags BC! Expanding our team has allowed us to have greater operational oversight, keep up our mandated commitment to mentorship, and prevent staff over-work and burnout. 

Increasing our staff capacity also meant that we were finally able to run Room with an accurate pulse on our financial outlook. Unfortunately, we realized that our finances had been more significantly and systemically disrupted than we originally thought. The events of 2025, and the mismanagement leading up to it, has put Room’s survival at risk in a way that cannot be resolved without community support. 

Room’s past and future plans

We had fundraised successfully in 2023 with the help of this brilliant, engaged community, and have been reluctant to reach out for community support again so soon. However, in light of this huge blow dealt last year, and an ongoing deficit, Room is in a precarious situation and may not survive. Unfortunately, with the blow that was dealt last year, we are struggling to pay staff salaries, with staff working unpaid overtime and at great personal detriment, to keep the lights on.

In recent history, when Room transitioned from an all-volunteer team to one that paid staff, editors, and contributors, everything changed. Suddenly, so many more people could join our collective! People who didn’t have the means to volunteer their time—often BIPOC, queer people, parents, and people from low-income backgrounds—were now able to bring their creative vision and expertise to Room. What followed was a dramatic flourishing of BIPOC-led and 2SLGBTQ+-led publications, events, and outreach initiatives emerging from Room. Our pages and masthead have never been so diverse, and our programming has never been so vibrant.

It’s our highest priority to keep nourishing this space, and to continue paying our staff, editors, contributors equitably. Given the shutdowns of feminist publishers like Jezebel and Bitch Media in the last few years, we’re more aware than ever of the necessity of feminist literature, especially in times of rising fascism and book bans. 

Our current short-term goals include raising funds to pay outstanding fees and reduce our deficit. Looking forward over the next few years, Room plans to seek new sustainable funding for the magazine, including changing aspects of our editorial direction, strengthening and building more community partnerships, and increasing engagement from our board of directors to alleviate staff pressure.  Our number one priority is establishing checks and balances to create a new Room that’s organizationally stable and sustainable into the future. We want this to be a place where radical feminist thought can thrive as long as possible.

What can you do?

If you want to support Room, there are dozens of perks to choose from in our fundraiser that might interest you! You’ll find subscription bundles, signed copies of award-winning books, cool merch, poetry and manuscript consultations with experienced editors, workshops and classes, and more.

We’re incredibly grateful for the individuals and community partners who have donated to our fundraising campaign! Scroll down to read more about the fantastic work these organizations and individuals are doing.

While we are fundraising, we’re still doing business as usual, too. If you don’t feel called by our perks, you can support Room Magazine by joining our Patreon for a continuous print and soon digital subscription with extra perks; or by becoming a subscriber, checking out our summer sale, or browsing 50 years of independent feminist literature with our back issues and bundles.

You can also find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and keep up with everything we do on our monthly newsletter. Sharing our campaign on your platforms goes a long way!

Book Bundles:

• Signed copies of Canisia Lubrin’s forthcoming Bright Machine Billy Ray-Belcourt Book Bundle
• House of Anansi Bestseller and Forthcoming Books Bundle
• Ursula Le Guin Book Bundle
• Penguin Random House’s Fresh-Off-The-Press Bundle, featuring Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Fatimah Asghar’s Daughter of the Mountains, and Michelle Good’s Eliza Sunshine

Arts and Culture Offerings:

• Festival tickets and merch for the Vancouver Writers Festival
• Reading Passes for the Whistler Writers’ Festival
• Tattoo Tickets for @Leo.Mortem
• Headshot Sessions with Yvonne Hanson Photography
• Vancouver International Film Festival Passes

Writing Workshops:

• Writing Workshop with Chen Chen: “Getting Unstuck”
• Writing Workshop with Diana Khoi Nguyen: Listening to Images
• Writing Workshop with Jessica Johns: “Wronging, or Revenge: Horror When You Are The Ghost”
• Writing workshop with Cassidy McFadzean: Community, Friendship, and Care
• Writing Workshop with Alix Ohlin: Characters in Constellation: Beyond the Hero’s Journey
• Grant Writing Workshop with Cassandra Myers: Literary Grant Writing for Disabled and BIPOC Poets
• Grant Writing Workshop with Molly Cross-Blanchard: Demystifying Arts Grants