Dave – the editor

As mentioned at the start of our previous post – A way forward? 16.5.23 – everything we do with this project is under constant review. Well, Grassroots Alternatives has had its last review. As you can tell from the title of this post and the revised title at the top of this page, this blog has now been archived. We’ll try to explain the reasons we’ve chosen to do this. We’ll also explain what’s gone and what’s staying on the now archived blog.

Trying to transfer the Grassroots Alternatives project from where we used to live in the south of Essex to the Avon region where we now reside was always going to be a bit of a gamble. This was particularly the case given that there’s a long established activist scene in the region, and it could be said that we were trying to gatecrash it with the transfer of Grassroots Alternatives.

We’ve given it nine months down here in the Avon region and we’ve not gained the traction we felt was needed to carry the Grassroots Alternatives project forwards. Life’s too short to spend time and energy on a project that isn’t going forwards. Nine months is long enough to try and get some traction – it’s time to call it quits and move on.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of our sister project, The Stirrer. A fair few of you may well be aware that The Stirrer has a bit of a ‘reputation’ as a result of its maverick take on issues ranging from gender identity politics, lockdowns and Covid restrictions through to the ‘great reset’ and the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. A take that hasn’t exactly endeared us to a number of activists and groups in the region.

As you can imagine, if there are activists in the region who don’t like the take The Stirrer has on a range of issues, any public distribution of the Grassroots Alternatives paper always had the potential to be more fraught than we would like, particularly in Bristol. Life really is too short to have to put up with that.

As this blog is now an archive, there are a few changes. The major one is that The Directory has gone. This was the page where we had a list of a range of grassroots projects, resources and campaigns that we started to compile when we moved down here last summer. Given the close association of Grassroots Alternatives to The Stirrer, there’s probably a chance that some of the projects and groups we had listed would not be happy with our linking to them. To avoid any friction, we thought the best and fairest course of action was to completely delete The Directory.

A number of posts referring to The Directory and the paper have been deleted. We’re going to review the remaining posts and there’s a good chance some of them may be re-posted over on The Stirrer. The Memes and Posters pages will remain – these have proved to be quite popular! Some of these may be transferred to The Stirrer. As this is now an archive, the Posters and Leaflets pages will remain.

Last but by no means least, what has happened with Grassroots Alternatives does not affect any of the practical, community focused projects we’re involved with. Work on those will carry on:)