After our first session of Marginal Changemakers, one of our members, Toad Cook took pen to paper (or hands to keyboard) to compose this incredible blog. Keep reading to meet Toad and learn what happened behind the scenes!

There were ten of us sitting around the table, all from different backgrounds, different perspectives, all marginalised in some way. All wanting to create change and needing to.

And where better to do this than in Comics Youth, within a community that inspires change on a national scale? Through a program that is ready to change the book world.

Marginal Changemakers is an amazing, exciting, and thrilling program that has just started it’s work. Focusing on changing the publishing industry from the outside and from within. All campaign work will be created and planned by a team of passionate and inspired individuals- with sessions being facilitated by the talented, creative, and incredibly knowledgeable Emily (Comics Youth and Marginals Youth Empowerment Director!)

The session started with hellos, pronouns sharing, and conversing about our excitement before diving into our program.

Emily began breaking down our campaign as we scribbled passionately into our gifted notebooks. She stopped between slides to connect with us and check in; showing that making change goes hand in hand with self-care. That it's okay to say no and have boundaries; that we cannot break down institutions if we are breaking down ourselves. Comics Youth’s activism is wonderful for how the programs and the facilitators put a focus on self-care and kindness first.

Note taking is key!

Toad took some notes during the session to remind them of all the exciting things happening during Marginal Changemakers.

And then, we dived in.

For Marginal Changemakers there will be three campaigns:

● The launch of an inclusivity charter.

● Connecting with book stockists to encourage inclusivity.

● A campaign of our choice.

And probably the most exciting and nerve-wracking part: the hosting and creating of a National Conference for publishers, creatives, book stockists, and more. We will spend the first six months training, learning from the ground up about what publishing is and how we can systematically fight against the issues within it, and how to recruit other Changemakers to join us. Then the last six months will be about enacting our change and pushing it through the publishing world.

We also wrote our Safe Spaces policy, how to navigate and create change healthily through being lovingly critical, using content warnings and ‘I’ statements, building friendships, and also eating warm food. We spoke about recognizing how there are multiple truths to marginalised identities, including how our team during the first session were all white and how we cannot be a voice for people of colour. Within activism, we have to recognise our privileges so we can support the right voices.

We all have different reasons to join this fight. For me, I want to increase the accessibility of publishing and writing, as an Autistic writer navigating the world of suits and ties and of institutionalised ableism, homophobia and more. I can't attempt to navigate it. And doing so saps all of my creativity, it is exhausting to be creative in a world that only cares about profit margins.

For others in our group, their reasons focus on how fiction should be a positive, healthy escape and that it should represent what it writes about. Such as mental illnesses not being demonised or the symptoms being embellished for narrative's sake. Others are creatives who have seen how their work has been treated by publishers, with ‘diversity advertised as though it’s a trigger warning.’

We are tied together, despite our many varied reasons, by wanting to create change. And after our first session, watching ideas and passion bounce off the walls, I think we will not only do that but create a legacy and hopefully shake the book world up.

If you would like to keep up to date with the progress of the Marginal Changemakers programme, keep your eyes peeled for more blogs, videos and posts across our website here and on social media @comicsyouth on all platforms.

Marginal Changemakers- THE START OF SOMETHING NEW