Issue 23:
March 22, 2026
A genocidal massacre in the city of El Fasher in western Sudan began on 26 October 2025. Humanitarian experts consider it the worst war crime committed during the Sudanese civil war, characterized by mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of civilians have been executed or murdered and as of December 2025, events are ongoing.
I have to admit I knew none of this. The Sudanese Student Association reached out to us for a possible collaboration just days before this massacre. When I attended their following teach-in, I was welcomed into a space of 18 and 19 year olds taking up the mantle of calmly explaining to outsiders like me the details of possibly the world’s most deadly on-going genocide that no one seems to be talking about; many of whom with family still in Sudan.
This pattern continued when I attended their subsequent rally at the Capital building, armed with a sound recorder. Dozens of community members attended, many as families, to stand up and declare that Sudan deserves to be free and their suffering cannot continue to be ignored.
This issue is those interviews.
Issue 22:
March 8, 2026
We conduct the majority of our interviews at the downtown library. They have a three cubical style meeting rooms for this specific purpose. For this issue, I had the privilege of speaking with Lysne, the founder of Helping Women Period. While, mostly organized around distributing period supplies to anyone in our community who needs them, HWP also focuses on education. AFAB people deserve to speak opening about their bodies and learn about the best options for them to manage their periods.
A man in the next cubical could be heard sighing loudly. About 20 minutes in he came and knocked on our door to let me know in hushed tones that he could "hear every word we were saying about that lady stuff.” He said this as if we should be embarrassed, as if we should have been discussing this in embarrassed hushed tones.
There’s nothing embarrassing about the products that help a person manage their period, just like there’s nothing embarrassing about needing Plan B, condoms or a pregnancy test. All of these items are essential to ensuring half the world’s population maintain autonomy over their bodies and I’m so proud Lansing has so many organizations working to distribute these supplies for free.
Issue 21:
February 21, 2026
Issue 21:
February 21, 2026
Though unable to attend a NOVA Lansing’s Housing Initiate Meeting, I did watch the live steam. If I’m being completely honest, it made me rather embarrassed as a member of this community to hear again and again the same repeated rhetoric of “We’re all for helping homeless folks but don’t you dare put them in my neighborhood.” Of an hour and half of public commenters I only counted one who was in fact homeless, that is to say, only one person who could actually live in the mod pods. Just last week, Mayor Shor approved NOVA’s suggested mod pod location of the DHS parking lot where it will be fenced and surveilled by security. The purpose of this issue was to hear directly from displaced folks in our community about how they feel about this development.
If you have been following the city’s lawsuit against the property owners of Dietrich Camp and their eventual destruction of said camp, then you know the city was court ordered to provide housing to the camp’s residents until they find other permanent housing. Many of these folks are being housed at Causeway Bay, a hotel on the edge of town. Reporters are currently banned from interacting with residents within the hotel, but Punks with Lunch allowed me to accompany them on their bi-monthly food (and other essentials) distribution, going door to door throughout the hotel to ensure Detreich residents have the bare essentials.
It was through their generosity that I had the pleasure to meet many of these residents. What I thought would be interviews regarding the Mod Pods turned largely into interviews regarding the city’s current treatment of these residents within the Causeway Bay itself. Their message was loud and clear, if the mod pods are actually meant to help folks experiencing homelessness then why is their valuable feedback being ignored? And why should they trust the Mod Pods won’t be run like a penitentiary when so many report that the hotel itself has been turned into a kind of jail? This issue is their words.
Issue 20:
Feb. 8th, 2026
Deep Green claims to be a new kind of data center. They have to make a point of setting themselves apart from other data centers because these centers have already caused so much harm in other communities in the form of wasting precious natural resources, raising local utility costs and negatively impacting community health.
We are dealing with something here which is providing very little real world examples of working well within a community and a whole lotta examples of it working very badly, for example all the data centers in the South who are at the point where they need even more energy so they’ve expanded to coal mining and other dirty energy methods. How do we know Deep Green won’t turn to similar methods if they ever need more energy than anticipated?
Just because Deep Green is presenting a closed loop system we’re just supposed to look the other way? We’re just supposed to make our city the guinea pig for this new system and trust a company with absolutely no stake in our community aside from profit margins? If this new system truely has zero drawbacks as their website suggests, why aren’t they implementing it in their own cities, where their own children play. Why are they making Lansing the experiment? And why are you considering letting them?
Issue 19 :
Jan 25, 2026
Does non-violent protest work? Who is it actually for? Despite having attended dozens of protests in my life, I was still stuck on these fundamental questions, mostly because I often go away from protests feeling like the person I helped the most was myself.
After interviewing local organizers for this issue I’m learning that perhaps that is the point. Non-violent demonstrations pave the way for more sustained efforts by emboldening everyone present to continue doing the work. It gives us a space to yell and to grieve alongside others telling up that we are not alone. At the same time, by boldly wearing our hearts on our sleeves we invite others to show up more boldly in their own communities. In this way, protest is the fuel that keeps so many of us going and invites new folks in to do the same.
Most importantly perhaps, protest (and legal observance) is our legal right and no one, not even those fucking ICE murderers are going to take it from us.
Issue 18 :
Jan 11, 2026
Michigan’s Great Lakes represent 20 percent of the world’s surface fresh water supply. A major spill from pipeline 5 could contaminate all of it. Enbridge has already operated for five years illegally ignoring Gov. Whitmire’s order to shit down. Now Enbridge is proposing a tunnel construction to contain pipeline 5 under the Mackinaw Straights in case of spills. Let’s call it for what it is— corporate greed at the expense of our clean water and habitat.
Hi there! This is Erin. I founded this project in February of last year. Since then it has grown so much larger than myself and has accomplished more than I could have predicted in my little kitchen printer days.
The largest change is that this zine is now larger than just me (as it was always intended to be). Together we are growing a team committed to making issues reflexive of what we think folks in our community deserve to know and delivering hope instead of despair.
This issue focuses on this very project; our hopes, our goals for the next year and how more folks can get involved.
Issue 17 :
Oct 26, 2025
Issue 16 :
Sept 14, 2025
A city built for cars puts pedestrians, wheel chair users and bicyclists in danger. It suppresses our downtown economy and disproportionately negatively effects the lower income in our community.
This issue focuses on Strong Towns, a nationally org with an active Lansing chapter, working to create a city where anyone can feel safe on the road and have walkable access to a grocery store. Radical, I know…
Issue 15 :
Aug 31, 2025
This week’s issue is a summary of the rapid response training hosted here in Lansing by GR Rapid Response to ICE. They shared with us an incident in Grand Rapids where ICE was showing up a local elementary school to use children as bait in order to arrest parents.
ICE’s budget is now larger than most of the world’s militaries. We’re seeing them arrest without due process. We’ve seen them deport children. We’ve seen them opening defy our nations courts to illegally deport over 250 men to a maximum-security mega-prison in El Salvador…
Issue 14 :
Aug 17, 2025
Imagine you have a disability that requires use of a wheelchair and makes it hard to work. You spend years filing and re-filing to get on either SSI or SSDI. When you finally get approved, you start looking for a home only to be unable to find one you can enter safely, let alone navigate in. This is because though 15% of Michiganders require mobility devices only 1% of homes are wheelchair accessible. Unable to find such a home, you are forced to buy a home you cannot even yet use the bathroom in and pay for the renovations yourself…
Issue 13 :
Aug 3, 2025
If you are reading this you are probably already aware that Lansing intended to use the courts to sweep an encampment. Instead of providing with residents of Dietrich Park the very minimum to service the city of Lansing intended to sue the property owners to force the houseless of their land leaving the residents with no where to go and setting a terrifying precedent. This is all happening on the heels of Trump’s latest executive order to allow forced institutionalization of the U.S.’s homeless population into an already overfilled and under supported behavioral health system…
Issue 12 :
Jul 20, 2025
The Lansing Primary for mayor and half of city council is August 5th. Last week’s issue focused on Mutual Aid, the practice of offering mutual community care to fill the cracks where systemic inequalities have failed us all.
Participation in local government elections is the best way we can directly combat those inequalities at their source.
While rights and protections are being striped away on a federal level seemingly on a weekly basis, it is more important than ever to have local civil servants in power who can advocate for equitable and just protections.
Issue 11 :
Jul 6, 2025
With the passing of Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, we know by design the poorest among us are going to suffer the most. Perhaps more than ever before, our leaders have made it clear they don’t give a shit about providing the most basic of human rights; the right to medical care, healthy food, housing, clean air and an education.
Now more than ever is the time to invest in Mutual Care. This doesn’t mean charity, but rather the praxis of recognizing that our society will only ever be as safe for any of us as it is for those struggling the most…
Issue 10 :
June 22, 2025
In a striking turn of events Trump has dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear sites, thus confirming our government’s loyalty to Israel, a nation actively seeking the annihilation of the Palestinian people through the targeted execution of their children.
What’s more, they are using our money to do it.
Please consider joining Palestine Solidarity Grand Rapids this week (6/26-6/30) in their March against Genocide to uplift the struggle of children, bring attention to the media and raise money for amazing and worthy causes…
Issue 9 :
June 8, 2025
I think many of us in the queer community have experienced abandoning the religious practices of our childhoods in favor of pursuing safer spaces where we could choose to be ourselves freely. This divide is so prevalent that we hear terms like "the religious right," but we know this is only a simplification of the full spectrum of the queer experience.
This issue highlights 3 queer community members who have held onto their faith, not as separate from but as part of their queer identities and the experience of a mom fighting to make her church inclusive.
Issue 8 :
May 25, 2025
Every person needs a place to live and despite the majority of us being just one emergency away from homelessness, the city would like us to imagine those without housing to be experiencing the effects of some kind of moral failing.
In reality, it is Lansing that is failing it’s constituents by failing to prevent our current affordability crisis. Similarly to a child moving the food around on her plate, Lansing would rather dangerously displace our homeless populations than actually offer any housing solution for them.
Issue 7 :
May 11, 2025
I’ve noticed that for many of us, our daily jobs feel small and sometimes meaningless in the face of the current political crisis. “How can I be expected to do customer service while people are being taken off the street?”
Caregivers can’t afford to check out. They have to continue doing the seemingly mundane tasks of taking care of someone else all while living the news along with the rest of us.
This week I asked four caregivers “What does it feel like to be a caregiver right now? What feels especially hard? Where are you finding hope? What do you wish more people understood about the experience?”
Issue 6:
April 26, 2025
It’s impossible to ignore the constitutional crisis currently inflicted on our country in regards to the thousands of documented, undocumented, mixed status and even U.S. citizens being rapidly deported without due process.
It seems our leaders think they can get away with this by targeting our black and brown neighbors. Immigrants and refugees are human. Immigrants and refugees make our country better. Immigrants and refugees have been fighting for too long alone and it’s time for the rest of us to share the load.
Issue 5:
April 12, 2025
This zine was created to showcase community resources in the Lansing area to remind us all that we are not alone. It seems like every day that we’re seeing more and more scary things coming out of the White House. It is my belief that this is by design. The Trump Administration wants us to become disheartened. They want us to think Trump is so powerful that we shouldn’t even try. If you are subscribed to this zine, I think you’re the kind of person that can see that he’s full of shit.
The longer I’ve worked on this zine, the more I have the privilege of seeing what an incredible place Lansing is full of resources and magical people doing the work with love, care and commitment to sustained resistance.
Issue 4:
March 28, 2025
This week’s edition was created specifically to be distributed at that rally as a means to connect isolated students to peers fighting for the same goals, promote student protest events and voices and most importantly to help students know they aren’t alone.
It did not disappoint. There was singing, there were chants and there were spectacular student speakers, some of which had been previously arrested for their protests.
Even if you yourself are not a MSU Student, there is so much hope to be gleamed from reading about their efforts and this week’s interview was a pleasure filled with empathy, clarity and honesty about how it feels to be a young student right now.
Issue 3:
March 15, 2025
It took three issues but this week’s zine is closer the form I dreamed of than any previous; that of a zine created for and by the community.
Check out “It’s Worth It” to read excerpt of an anonymous interview by a community member about her experience living in Lansing as a Trans woman and what resistance looks like to her. Thank you again for your honesty and generosity.
You will also find a two page break down focusing on The Allen Center, a place-based nonprofit organization that has been serving Lansing's Eastside since 1999.
Issue 2:
March 1, 2025
When working on this week’s issue I hit a wall. The information was coming faster than I could update. I was grinding my wheels, setting aside more and more time to write, while meanwhile creating a zine that felt further and further from its goal; to help people, to connect them, and to aid in the fight against tyranny.
The truth of the matter is that this war is being waged by our attention spans. People learn what the government is doing through the media so if you overwhelm the media all at once no coherent opposition can emerge. Instead of circling back and identifying the wins, it keeps us constantly outraged, constantly afraid and oftentimes it seems, constantly exhausted.
Issue 1:
Feb 16, 2025
Leave no room for doubt that Lansing is a city that opposes tyranny and protects its neighbors.