![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldXtra!'s Michael Lyons writes about the ongoing success of Glad Day, run for a year by a well-financed group of community investors.
There's online fundraising for this brand at IndieGogo. So far, $792 of a goal of 15 thousand Canadian dollars have been raised. (No, I've not yet contributed. Yes, I probably should.)
[F]or local teacher and activist Michael Erickson, who, along with 21 other community members, purchased the iconic Yonge Street bookshop one year ago, the opportunity to buy the store was a dream waiting to happen. “When we did the call-out for who’d be interested, I think a lot of the owners had always secretly wished that one day they could own a bookstore,” Erickson says. “I think a lot of us fantasized about this.”
Following the closure of New York City’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop in 2009, Glad Day became the world’s oldest queer bookstore, Erickson says. “We spent the past year focusing on sustainability of the store, which I think we’ve done a good job at, but in order for us to survive we have to move to build.”
The next step, he says, is turning Glad Day into an online brand. “We would like to create our own platform to sell books on,” he says. “It would also have a space to list our events coming up. We have some ideas for a community memory project we’d like to post and house on there as well. We also have a book review blog in the works.
“Ideally, it’s the sort of site where people could go on a regular basis, get reviews on books, get connected with the past and hopefully even propose visions and ideas for the future for our community. And buy books.”
There's online fundraising for this brand at IndieGogo. So far, $792 of a goal of 15 thousand Canadian dollars have been raised. (No, I've not yet contributed. Yes, I probably should.)
