AGR needs your help!

Can you spare $500? Okay, how about $250 or $100? Actually any amount, including $5-10, would help us out greatly. Very simply – we need money.

Although we do our best to keep our expenses to a minimum, it still costs over $2000 per month to produce this free weekly newspaper.

All of us here at AGR do this every week for free, on a strictly volunteer basis. From the editors who put in sometimes over 30 hours/week to the person who takes one or two hours to hang fliers for a benefit – we all do it because we believe in it.

We also need you, the readers, to help us out. Whether you’re a subscriber in Canada or an Asheville resident who picks up the paper downtown every week, we need your help. Financial contributions are a big part of that help.

The more money we receive during this fund drive means the less time we need to devote to fundraising over the next six months and the more time we can devote to actually producing the paper. And if we receive enough funds we may actually be able to get some equipment fixed or upgrade our web site or get that new computer we’ve been desperately needing for the past year.

This year, more than ever, we need to put the emphasis on individual contributions. Normally such contributions make up the bulk of our funding and are complimented through several grants throughout the course of the year. With the economy in a downturn many of the foundations we normally look to for funding are reporting a severe lack of funding themselves, and our prospects for any substantial grant funding look quite slim this year.

With the Bush junta launching “World War IV” and the US corporate media goose-stepping right along with them with their reporters “embedded” (in bed) with the US invasion army, the importance of our mission at AGR has skyrocketed and our value to our community has become quite evident.

Since the start of Bush’s war of aggression almost all of our downtown boxes and distribution locations have been running empty on a weekly basis. This tells us two things: more people are reading the AGR, and even more would if we could afford to print more copies.

Each of us has, on many occasions, received personal thanks and words of appreciation from friends or people on the street for our work at AGR. We would also like to thank our readers. We greatly appreciate you -- without you we’d just be shouting in the dark.

Please help any way you can, and thank you.

Asheville Global Report Editorial Collective

Send your check or money order to:

Asheville Global Report
P.O. Box 1504
Asheville, NC 28802

Or call: 236-3103