The Skeleton Park Arts Festival (SPAF) team has launched fundraising efforts to keep the beloved Skeleton Press going.

The Skeleton Press is a quarterly paper serving the Skeleton Park neighborhood and surrounding area. They distribute over 6,000 issues throughout the Skeleton Park (also known as McBurney Park) neighborhood and the rest of the city each season. The Skeleton Press is unique publication, filled with content produced by community members.

“Fortunately, there's a lot of great writers in this neighborhood, also artists, illustrators, photographers. We're an arts neighborhood and arts organization, so there's a lot of content about that. And politics and neighborhood politics, but it's just a really fun way for sharing ideas, sharing stories and also just kind of presenting a broad and diverse perspective of different people's voices in this area,” explains Greg Tilson, Director of the Skeleton Park Arts Festival.

The project originally launched near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to foster connection while in-person programming was suspended. But with the return of in-person programming and without additional support provided by pandemic-specific initiatives, SPAF is in need of support to keep the paper running.

“It was so successful and the neighborhood responded in just an incredibly supportive and positive way that we want to keep it going, Tilson said. "And so we're trying to find those new revenue streams without resorting to ads, because that seems to be something that neighborhoods value, without charging a subscription fee. And so we're trying to take an approach where we're calling friends of the Skeleton Park Arts Festival community.”

The first fundraising event will be a concert starring Charlotte Cornfield, a talented local musician who has also worked with SPAF in the past. The concert will take place at 2 p.m. this Saturday, Nov. 25, at Next Church, 89 Colbourne St., and entry will be by donation.

“We are finding there's just a desire to support a neighborhood newspaper, a community grassroots newspaper like this, especially at this time where our sources to this kind of media not as accessible as they used to be,” says Tilson.

More information on The Skeleton Press, including past issues of the paper, you can visit the SPAF website. 

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