Commentary: Is the end at hand?

We have covered your neighborhood meetings, the issues that affect you and the events that add to your life.

We have run hundreds of photographs that have delighted you and hundreds of columns that have helped you relate literature to your life.

When we began in 1976 we told you that we would give you as much information about the things which affect the quality of life in your neighborhoods as we could with the financial and creative resources you provided us.

It was an extraordinary act of faith for us because the publication's survival was dependent on the willingness of hundreds of neighborhood residents to contribute the money and labor needed to produce the publication — not on a government agency or a private charitable foundation.

We set 11 specific goals before we published the first issue.

• To establish a serious publication, meeting professional standards, to provide maximum support for community programs attempting to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods.

• To provide a community identity by defining the similarities and differences which make our neighborhoods unique.

• To promote a high level of community participation in community affairs.

• To provide the essential information that people who live in the community need to make informed decisions about the issues that affect them, thus make it possible for them to act in their best interest rather than merely react to decisions made for them by other people.

• To serve as a burning glass to focus community opinions so that when people representing the community speak to outside groups they will speak with the power of the whole community.

• To provide a forum for the exchange of differing viewpoints to give the people of the community an opportunity to judge issues on their merits.

• To promote a sense of community by establishing relationships between members of the community.

• To promote pride in our community by making people aware of the unique advantages of living here.

• To help solve community problems by focusing our inherently rich human resources on them.

• To serve as a rallying point for collective community action.

• To survive over an extended period of time by becoming self-sufficient after the development stage was completed (after four to six issues).

Since that first issue was published July 3, 1976, we have battled to meet those goals. We have published more than 5,120 pages of news, features and photographs about neighborhood preservation and improvement issues in 480 editions of East Village Magazine.

In the beginning about 500 households in two neighborhoods received the magazine. Now about 6,000 families in more than a dozen neighborhoods get the magazine delivered to them and about 2,000 families in other parts of the city get the magazine from one of our bulk distribution points in government, educational or business buildings.

We think our accomplishments are significant, but now we have reached the point where we have to decide if we will continue.

We face four major problems.

First, the economic climate in Flint is rotten.

Since the beginning, we have depended primarily on small business for advertising. It used to pay about half of our expenses, but the amount is decreasing ($1,371 in March 2000, $1,139 in March 2001, $1,023.75 in March 2002 and about $950 this month).

Second, while most of our contributors renew their contributions year after year, there simply are not enough people giving enough money.

The contributors have remained about the same during the last five years. About 80 out of about 8,000 households that get the magazine (about one percent) contribute each year.

Third, for the past few years we have depended on one major contributor to make up the difference. She died in September.

Fourth, it takes hundreds hours a month to produce and distribute the magazine.

Volunteers have written the stories, sold the ads, delivered the magazine and done all the rest of the necessary tasks to see that a magazine gets to your door since the beginning. But currently much less than one percent of the households that get the magazine are contributing their time.

Our expenses are minimal — no staff salaries, no cars, no plush offices, no weekends in Vegas.

Printing and typesetting are about 90 percent of our costs, telephone and internet about 4 percent, mailing about 3 percent and paper, envelopes, computer discs and other office supplies about 3 percent.

If we were just starting many of you would jump to support us. Just the idea of an all-volunteer, non-profit professional quality magazine published exclusively for you would attract more than one percent of the prospective households getting the magazine.

But we are not just starting out. You do not have to take promises of what we will do. We have a track record of more than 26 years.

Unfortunately most of you have begun taking us for granted. You have gotten this unique magazine at your door hundreds of times without you having to do anything. You assume it will continue to be there forever.

Is the East Village Magazine worth one dinner out a year or one television program a month?

The East Village Magazine is an information cooperative — everyone contributes, everyone benefits. You have to do your part.

If you do not, it is likely that we will be forced to end this unique 26-year-old experiment in grassroots journalism.