Over the past decade, we—an international team of writers, editors, photographers, designers, programmers and tour guides that call the German capital home—channeled as much of our passion for the city as we could into the Slow Travel Berlin project. Through articles, essays, workshops, tours, books and events, we have been committed to profiling the city in all its glorious diversity, from its rich and troubled history to its vibrant present.
After a series of unfortunate events (the gory details of which you can read more about in our first post on Steady below), we were forced to stop work in 2016. I took the site offline for a while but it felt wrong to keep all this great content by so many people unavailable, so I looked for ways to get it back online.
I knew I couldn't run it for free any more, so I started looking at how we could raise funds for our basic costs: hosting and admin fees, as well as paying people for their writing, editing and research work. To that end, we decided to start a crowd-funding campaign via Steady in 2020. Thanks to those who opted to support us, we have been able to update many of the 500+ articles on the site as well as adding more at the rate of one per month (so far).
I remain very grateful to everyone who has and continues to support us to keep the project going. It means we can continue to be one of the very few independent websites in the city, i.e. not beholden to investors, advertisers, sponsorship or funding of any kind. Not only does that help make the website a pleasant, ad-free environment for our web content but it means we can be outspoken and uncensored about ongoing social and political issues in the city—an important aspect of what we do.
If you like the sound and style of what we do, and especially if you have enjoyed all our free content over the years, please do consider supporting us in creating engaging, informative and practical content across a wide range of themes from art and architecture, social issues and sustainable culture, to food, literature and local history.
To ensure you get some bang for your buck, many of our essays and articles are now members-only (some just for a limited time to give a period of exclusive access), and with more funding we can write not only publish more but hopefully build a regular newsletter again with a mix of news, opinion, event recommendations, exclusive info and discounts on upcoming tours and whatever else we can think of. You can also write and tell us what you would like, of course.
Rest assured, we will always support the same values we have always believed in—championing Berlin as a city of openness, tolerance, diversity and community. Less hype, more depth.
Thank you again for reading this and, hopefully, your support.
Paul Sullivan (founder) & the Slow Travel Berlin team