MISSION STATEMENT

For the Birds Collective is an NYC – based collaborative group of female-identified people dedicated to challenging social inequality through DIY feminist cultural activism. With backgrounds in social justice organizing and various artistic pursuits, our objective is to promote the creative interests of gender-oppressed community members.

We recognize the importance of collaboration, shared knowledge, self-expression, and meaningful engagement in order to facilitate a sustainable community. We seek to combat transphobia, sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and other oppressions of marginalized groups, to connect struggles, and to reflect on our own privileges. We emphasize the need for accessibility, safer spaces, and support within our communities.

As a collective, our collaborative website, event curation, feminist zine and music distro, enable us to engage with a feminist network. We have written our own zine, entitled So You Want to Start a Feminist Collective, to answer questions about our collective process, encourage others to start their own collectives, and share the knowledge we’ve gained together. The collective has hosted an annual all-day feminist multimedia event known as the Big She-Bang and a summer event series, Birds of Summer. In addition, throughout the year we organize events like skill-shares, discussions, workshops, social networking events, art and music shows. We produce a bi-monthly feminist event newsletter and blog, and engage in internal group processing and self-care. We are constantly looking for new ways to meet the needs of our communities.

We hope that our work helps the social change we envisage to take flight. If you are interested in organizing or collaborating with us, please get in touch!

For the Birds Members at the Fourth Annual Big She-Bang, Judson Memorial Church-- August 15, 2009

ABOUT US

For the Birds formed in the wake of the Long Island Womyn’s Collective and in concurrence with many other projects — including the 3rd annual Big She-Bang! festival [originally organized by the LIWC], the Big She-Bang! compilation, The Worst compilation zine, and the Biography of Jodi Tilton zine, among other artistic and activist projects. For the Birds was a nameless, nebulous group when we began planning the Big She-Bang 3. Soon after the festival was over, we re-established our dedication to a fully active DIY feminist presence in the New York area and in the following months, chose the moniker For the Birds.

A group of New York women took the initiative to pick up where previous creative feminist projects left off, and established a collective whose main intent is fostering the creative empowerment of women, as well as the dissemination of feminist projects: art, music, information, and scholarly work. A large part of this feminist info-sharing occurs in the form of a distro and a label imprint. In our distro, we carry writing, art, and music by feminists and women-identified folks. On our label imprint, we continue to publish similar work.

Aside from carrying and producing feminist work, For the Birds is a feminist curatorial group, booking DIY art, music, and multimedia events in New York City. We have also authored a workshop entitled “Queer Eye for the DIY,” about maintaining a more inclusive feminist practice while staying true to our DIY roots.

Please see our distro/label section for a complete list of our original releases.