Hello everyone,

After several months of gestation, we are excited to announce that the Design Justice Network is emerging into a new phase of growth!

We (the DJN Steering Committee) have been hard at work reviewing notes, requests, and suggestions that you all have shared with us over the past several years at Design Justice network gatherings, workshops, sessions, and events. We met in person in Toronto for a retreat where we hashed out some next steps, and now we're happy to share those with you.

1) Membership

If you receive this newsletter, you may already be a signatory to the Design Justice Network Principles (If not, please consider signing on!) If so, we are inviting you to take the next step and become a Member of the Design Justice Network. You can become a Member either as an Individual or as an Organization, and we have a sliding scale as well as in-kind options to cover membership fees. Once you become a Member, you'll get access to the DJN Members discussion list, Slack workspace, early access to new DJN resources, announcements about gigs and job opportunities, and other goodies.

We decided to try out a sliding scale fee-or-service-for-membership approach because we have been coordinating the DJN as volunteers for several years, and we are curious about whether we might be able to do more if we have some revenue to pay a part-time network coordinator, among other costs. For more details and to become a DJN Member, please head over to https://designjusticenetwork/membership.

2) DJN Structure

We also made some decisions about how the Design Justice Network will be structured (short version: We have Signatories, Members, Working Groups, Local Nodes, and a Steering Committee!). If you'd like to learn more, you can check out this document (it's a work in progress).

3) Local Nodes

The DJN strives to decentralize power and support local autonomy. We encourage Members to self-organize local Nodes in the Design Justice Network! There are Local Nodes already meeting in Toronto and Philly, and there are people who have stepped up to help create Local Nodes in NYC, Boston, and Barcelona (!) If you want to join an existing local node or create a new one, we encourage you to become a Member, then message the members list to see if there are others near you with the same idea :)

4) Upcoming Events
We have exciting events in the near future:

We'll be present at the Papanek Symposium 2019: "Real World: Design, Politics, Future," within the Porto Design Biennale, Portugal, September 26–27, 2019;
The Design Justice Mediterranea Meeting will take place in Pisa, Italy, from October 13-15th 2019!
For more info about upcoming events see http://designjusticenetwork.org/events.
To list your events, first become a Member, then send a message to the discussion list or drop a note in Slack in the #announcements channel!

Thanks for all the work that you do,

Una, Wes, Victoria, and Sasha,

For the Design Justice Network Steering Committee