Membership FAQ

In short, due to a combination of inflation, rising material costs and too much pressure on our team, we can no longer produce enough magazines this year to fulfil our obligations to our paying members.

You can re-read the full announcement here.

I apologise for my oversight which has caused around 30 of our members not to receive our announcement before receiving the (very impersonal) email from Steady with the technical details of the membership discontinuation.

I fully understand that this must have been a very unwelcome surprise, and I will take extra care to include everyone in the event that any followup is required on our part. 

If you still have not received our statement, you can read the full announcement here. If you have any feedback or requests, please let us know at info@areweeurope.eu so that we can make the rest of the process as smooth as possible.

Once again, our sincerest apologies.

Rest assured, we are still hard at work producing border-breaking stories. However, instead of publishing magazines every quarter by investing from our own reserves, we want to make sure every publication is completely funded before we start production. In practice, this probably means we will probably only produce 1 magazine this year, but we are looking to slowly increase frequency in the future, while keeping our eye on  keeping the workload sustainable.

No! In fact, we believe that important stories and journalism should never be behind a paywall. This is one of the reasons we felt we couldn’t keep charging our members for access to stories that should actually be free for everyone to access.

You will be able to read all past and future issues of Are We Europe magazine for free here.

Our membership program is managed through Steady, our membership service provider. They are the party that collects the membership payments, and then they pay a part of your membership fee out to us for each month you remain a member. 

On the 2nd of march we sent an email to our members informing them of the discontinuation of the membership program. We subsequently contacted steady to inform them of this. 

On the 3rd of march, Steady will send out an email to each member, with the specific details of the discontinuation of their specific membership plan.

There are a number of options that we’ve foreseen.

1. If you are a yearly yearly-paying member, and you’ve paid a year in advance, you will receive a refund for every month that is still outstanding in your membership year.
2. If you are a monthly-paying member, the direct debit will be canceled, and your membership will end immediately.
3. If you are a print member who joined since our last issue (in november), you may not have received any magazine at all. Please get in touch with us to let us know if you would like to still receive #17 The borders of the union, a voucher for a future magazine, a different back order magazine or a refund.

If you are in any way unsatisfied with the refund you receive from Steady, or your situation is not among those foreseen above, please do not hesitate to send us a message at info@areweeurope.eu, so that we can figure out how best to compensate you. Our priority is to bring this process to a satisfactory conclusion for you, our valued and loyal members.

We will program a break into our production schedule to reevaluate how we can best achieve our mission, and truly fulfil our border-breaking ambitions.

This year we will be stepping up our participation in the ENTR consortium. We will run design sprints for our partners to come up with exciting new formats and experiments, and we will be producing and publishing a number of short video reportages from the Dutch language region and the Nordics throughout the year.

We are continuing to set up media hubs around Europe as part of The Circle. In March we will be in Vilnius, and we will travel to 5 more locations in the coming year.

Finally, our aim is to slowly start our own media production back up with a transmedia publication surrounding the theme Water. The sky is the limit for this thematic experience, as we explore the topic through a magazine, podcasts, videos, social media stories and more.

To keep you up to date, we will be adding our members to the regular newsletter schedule, in which we will be providing monthly updates about all our ongoing projects, the challenges we’re facing, and the things we’re learning along the way.

There are a. number of ways you can keep supporting our border-breaking efforts.

• Share our newsletter
  We will continue to publish new stories and updates from ongoing projects throughout the year in our monthly newsletter. Sign up here.
• Follow us on social media
  Check out our instagram & twitter
• Apply to a project or submit a pitch
  New opportunities will be posted periodically throughout the year. Check our opportunities page for more.
• Donate to Are We Europe
  Your donation will help us keep our foundation’s day-to-day activities running, so our project teams can focus on building the foundations for the next generation of European journalism. Make a one-time or recurring donation.