Since 2018, the Sask Dispatch, the locally-oriented sibling publication to Briarpatch, has supplemented Briarpatch’s national reporting and analysis with Saskatchewan-centric grassroots journalism. Help us fund the Sask Dispatch editor, Emily Klatt, to work full-time over the summer.

For a long time, Briarpatch has tried to balance its national scope and ambitions with a desire to keep stories from the Prairies, and Saskatchewan in particular, on the radar of activists everywhere. As successive reactionary governments have seized power across the prairies over the last few decades, they’ve turned the region into a proving ground for right-wing revanchism, brutal austerity, and free-market ruthlessness. The Sask Dispatch highlights the work of people on the ground fighting for a different, more humane, more just future.

From stories on the sell-off of Saskatchewan's public lands to the experiences of migrant workers in the cities, from analysis of the province’s dangerously inadequate sex education programs to reporting on the mutual aid project of community fridges, from interviewing survivors of sexual violence about their use of social media in holding powerful abusers accountable to critiquing the ongoing militarization of local police forces, the Dispatch brings the Briarpatch tradition of incisive grassroots journalism to bear consistently on the Land of Living Skies.

The Dispatch is a vital corrective to the right’s grip on the mainstream media narratives in the province, but it has always struggled with resources, and there’s a lot of unrealized potential. Right now, the Dispatch is edited primarily by one very part-time staffer, and we can’t afford to pay her for nearly enough hours to satisfy the demand for progressive, independent news in Saskatchewan.

But we want to change that. We want to embark on a pilot project to bring our current Dispatch editor, Emily Klatt, on full-time over July and August, allowing her to recruit more writers, edit and write more stories, and start growing the publication to the scale that Saskatchewan people deserve. It’s not a pace we can keep up forever right now, but generating a little bit of momentum and showing just what the Dispatch can do with the right resources will be crucial in helping us build the Dispatch up even further over the next few years.

We’re reaching out to ask for your help. We need to raise $4,000 to pay Emily full-time for the summer. With your donation, there's the potential to make a really big impact and to help reshape Saskatchewan news for years to come.

Briarpatch has always been able to do what it does thanks to the generosity and support of our readers, people who believe in the project as much as we do. We hope you’ll extend some of that generosity to us today.