We hope by now you’ve obtained a copy of No Boundaries. If not, we’ve just done a re-drop at a few coffee places around the city and the articles will soon be released online.

We distributed 7,000 copies to over 200 locations in all neighborhoods of Buffalo and its surrounding suburbs on October 14 and 15, 2016, and the response has been incredible. There is a desire to hear good news coming out of underreported areas, and No Boundaries delivered.

The paper was meant to stop people from painting entire sections of the city, entire communities of people with a single brush. When we’re talking about Buffalo’s renaissance, it is simply not real if it only includes a select few neighborhoods. We believe that bringing the entire city into the fold is possible if we tell the stories of people from every one of Buffalo’s neighborhoods. By shining a light on their situations, their triumphs and their ideas, we can get more people to open up and embrace those people they may have otherwise never spoken with, invest their time and money in new ways, and consider the entire city in their decision-making.

A city that embraces its diversity and realizes that it is only as strong as its weakest neighborhood can lift the entire region.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the positive change and ideas coming out of Riverside and Black Rock, from Kaisertown and Babcock, Hamlin Park and Masten Park, Lovejoy and Broadway Fillmore, Upper and Lower West Side, South Buffalo and the First Ward.

We need your help to continue. Issue Two will be coming out in April 2017. We need writers to head out and find all three sides of each story we want to tell. Issue Two will grow from 16 to 20 pages, from 7,000 to 10,000 papers distributed.

If interested in contributing to the paper and the mission behind it, reach out to us using hey@risecollaborative.com. Please include at least four writing samples, and the kind of content you’d like to create.

Thank you! Let’s keep working.

– Rise