Dear reader, 

It is our birth day today – but also our death day. 

After five years of platforming human rights stories, our team has made the difficult decision to close down the jfa. This news is bittersweet. Our team’s lives are growing and expanding in exciting directions. It has been tricky balancing new full-time jobs and big life decisions while still nurturing the jfa in the way it deserves. While we brainstormed for a long time on how to balance this, we eventually decided that ending with The Autonomy Issue was a fitting conclusion to this chapter of our lives. 

The work we’ve done with our digital and print publication has moved us deeply and we are so proud of the articles, poetry, art and photography that we’ve been able to platform. In the past five years, we’ve also hosted skill-building workshops, opened our online shop, and have been nominated for the Georgina Henry Award. We’re so proud of all these milestones and are grateful for the community we’ve built along the way. 

While there are still so many stories to tell, and so much work to be done in the human rights and independent media space, we feel that it’s important to allow this work to evolve in a way that is sustainable for the people behind it. 

The state of independent media is dire. There is no room for it to exist autonomously and free of the shitstorm that makes life a capitalist hellscape. Most of us can’t exist without running ads for big corporations or literally constantly begging for money. There is meagre funding in grants and we have to bend over backwards to get it. The truth is, many independent media platforms are run by people who work on them in addition to full-time jobs, leaving no free time to live life outside of these responsibilities. There are simply not enough resources to self-sustain. It should not have to be either / or.  

Our hope is that the landscape becomes kinder to independent media. We are sad that in the current state of the world (garbage fire), we can’t continue our work. More and more indie magazines are dying, and we are joining this statistic. 

Everyone vocally roots for independent media, yet makes little substantial effort to financially support it. But financial support is precisely what kept platforms like ours afloat. Our final request to you is to support magazines that are still alive, because this shit is exhausting. 

But just because magazines shut down, doesn’t mean their work didn’t happen. We feel the stories we platform are needed now more than ever. This is why we have decided to keep the jfa website alive for as long as possible. Our platform will continue to exist online because these stories demonstrate that we were once here, we did something important, and that matters too. 

To our contributors, we are grateful for your stories and know that they will always have a home on our website. You will forever be part of the jfa community. The jfa was so much more than the team members working behind the scenes – it was also the contributors, readers, and Patreon supporters. This magazine is an ode to what can be built with a nurturing ecosystem of international creatives and storytellers. 

Thank you for half of a wonderful decade.

Justice for all. 

Forever & always, 

Angana, Anna, Cat, Juliette & Michaella