by Sally Churchward.
In Common is a grass roots community news and features platform. It was set up around a year and a half ago, thanks to generous donations to pay towards the website development and hosting and people from in and around Southampton giving their time for free to write, photograph for and edit the site (you can meet some of them here).
In Common continues to be a labour of love, with all our writers, photographers and editors giving their time for free. We do this because we want to – we want to write/photograph and share that with people, we want to help build the local community, we want to tell stories that otherwise would go unheard, we want to provide a platform to local people to have their say, we want to encourage people to express themselves through writing or photography…the list goes on. The bottom line is, we do this because we want to.
However, we would really like to do more of what we do, both in terms of how much time the team already involved spend and also by attracting new writers and photographers. For some of the team, this is a rewarding hobby or a valued opportunity to serve the community through voluntary work. For others, we would like it to be more than that – but that means being able to make some money from the work we do, in order to do less other work and devote more time to In Common. For this reason, we have set up a Patreon account, through which you can make a regular monthly donation to help pay our running costs and hopefully mean people can be paid something for their creative time. The link is here: https://www.patreon.com/incommonsoton
In Common doesn’t have any shareholders and no one involved will make money from anyone else’s labour. But it would be really good if doing the thing we love could also help put food on the table.
We really love creating In Common and sharing it. As you’re here, reading this, we hope you love what we do too. If you can afford to donate the cost of buying us a collective cup of tea once a month, it would mean a lot to us, and hopefully, you’d be more than paid back in more and more varied content.
And whether or not you can afford to donate, please do follow us on Facebook and Twitter (also our Twitter books account) and have a chat with us on there, share our stories, tell your friends about us, and be part of our community too. And if you feel inspired to be part of our team, either with a one off story or as a regular contributor, we would love to hear from you.