The Slingshot Collective has been making media in the utopian margins for over 30 years, producing a quarterly newspaper that elevates the voices of freegans, radical squatters, guerrilla gardeners, prisoners, sex workers, punk rockers, bossless workplace organizers, abuse victims, tree-sitters, rioters, and others who aim to co-create “the better” through a diversity of tactics that include boycotts, blockades, articulations of abuse, marches, shows, occupations, and the efforts to (re)create everyday relations that preclude and radically eject logics of oppression and hierarchy. The Slingshot Collective also produces an annual day planner that is sold to fund the newspaper’s free distribution to over 20,000 readers across the globe, with free subscriptions to low-income folks and prisoners.
Samara Hayley Steele has been part of the Slingshot Collective since 2011, and her 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.
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.
Samara Hayley Steele 
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