thehouseisintheyardandmyorganizersareinthehouse, k?
Yes, I’ve written about my Slingshot planner before. More than once. Guess what?
I’m doing it again.
It feels more important than ever to talk about.
Here is the description from the pros:
The large-size version is bound with a super tough tough plasticoil binding and is twice the size of the “classic” pocket organizer (5.5 inches X 8.5 inches) with twice as much space to write all the events in your life. It is 176 pages featuring radical dates for every day of the year, space to write your phone numbers, a contact list of radical groups around the globe, menstrual calendar, info on police repression, extra note pages, plus much more. You get a little bonus stuff in the spiral version. The spiral version is available in 18 colors printed with either black or silver ink (depending on how dark the paper stock is). The covers are laminated with heavy duty 3 mil glossy plastic to help it survive the year.
This is the version I buy every year. There are two others:
- a pocket version
- a spiral-bound pocket version
I have been using a Slingshot organizer since 2016. Here is a smol gallery of my covers through the years:
The bottom one is my 2025 planner. My 2020 and 2022 ones are missing – I think they must be in a box somewhere? I’ll find them.
The Slingshot Organizer comes in 18 different colors. Some years, I choose my colors, Others I ask the bookstore I order it from to surprise me. Red is a popular color for me obviously.
This year I chose teal, because I feel like its one of my brand colors – for the lollipops and this blog.
Every year, there is a letter in the beginning of the planner. This year’s begins with, “Salutations — you light up the room and you’re loveable”
Sometimes (a lot of times), a human needs to hear that.
The first line of the second paragraph reads “Capitalism and its computers make more and more stuff, faster and faster— clueless as to why.”
That feels so accurate to the world we’re currently living in.
Here are some previous year’s opening lines for perspective:
- 2016: “Some of the most exciting moments we have experienced in the last few years have been in the streets, getting teargassed by armored riot cops, running around corners and through holes in fences with the people we love, scattering, regrouping, and coming back stronger than ever.”
- 2017: “The world is suffering from information overload — a constant barrage of distraction, seduction, and ultimately fear and despair that makes it harder to see the big picture, plan long-term, or just breathe the air and live your life.”
- 2018: “We;re not interested in publishing a calendar for the apocalypse.”
- 2019: “Collectively publishing a hand-drawn organizer in these dark days is a leap of faith — but it is not an act of foolishness.”
- 2021: “At a time when the global capitalist sytem is broken and failing, regular people create their own structure based on different values, with different heroes, different priorities, and using different tools.”
Now more than ever, my Slingshot Organizer is a tool. I’m so glad I kept my back issues since I started using it. Not because I want to relive the packed task list from the days I served someone else’s interests more than my own (aka my bosses.)
But because I want to have all the resources in the back of the book. Here is a little gallery of some of my favorite resources from previous editions.
Buy your own for this year’s resources. It will be good to have a physical copy of these things in the future. I don’t want to be a panic baby, but there is a very real chance that the shape of our Internet access will be changing in the next few years.
One final thing that delights me about this very incredible planner is the radical facts on each day.
Here are some fact highlights from my birthday over the years:
- 1492: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Spain, opression ensues x2
- 1905: Maggie Kuhn b. author & founder of Gray Panthers
- 1913: “Wheatland riots”: police fire into a crowd of CA farm workers trying to organize
- 1931: Riots follow 60,000 strong march vs. new eviction laws in Chicago
- 1936: Jesse Owens, a black athlete, wins the 100m Gold Medal in Nazi Germany
- 1959: Pidjiguiti Massacre in Potuguese Guinea, as state troops fire on protestors
- 1977 (my actual birthday): Bomb explodes in Mobil Oil building in NYC, Puerto Ricoan indep. mvmt claims responsibility
If you would like to hear your facts, just let me know! I love sharing them. When I am in a meeting and scheduling a future meeting, you will often hear me exclaim, “Oh shit – that was the day in 2014 when 3,000 Black Lives Matter protesters smashed some Berkeley cop cars in response to police brutality.”
As I’ve started working with more people that align with my true beliefs, I’m looked at less and less weird. People just kind of accept me now.
Here is where you can get a Slingshot of your own. I bought my first one at Park Ave CDs. So if you live in Orlando, I recommend going in person to support your local economy.
If you are interested in actual books in this realm, here are suggestions, directly from my planner:
- Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
- Active Hope by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone (this will probably be my next book purchase)
- Mutual Aid by Dean Spade
- How Facism Works by Jason Stanley
- Recollections of My Life as a Woman by Diane Di Prima
The full list inside my planner also includes some non-fiction, if you’re into that.
One final fact about my amazing Slingshot Organizer:
At the bottom of the first page of every iteration, it reads:
All volunteer collective — no bosses, no workers, no pay
That’s an idea I can get behind.
