Printers tend to think about printing in a mercantile way, and there is nothing wrong with that. Print is what they manufacture and sell to sustain their businesses. If they are commercial printers, the bulk of their output will be used to promote and advertise profit-making businesses of all kinds.

But print is also humanity’s first mass medium for speaking truth to power, exposing injustice, and driving social change. A New York City-based organization called Women’s Press Collective (WPC) is upholding print in that historic role by putting it into the hands of people who don’t do it for a living, but who have embraced it as a means of making their lives and those of other people better.

WPC recently received a cash grant from the Graphic Communications Scholarship Foundation (GCSF) in recognition of the training it offers to those who want to learn how to print in support of the causes they advocate. This is no small distinction for the group, which is staffed entirely by unpaid volunteers working with donated equipment and supplies.

In fact, WPC’s pressroom in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx may be the only remaining place in the New York City metro area where people who don’t work for printing companies can go to learn what an offset lithographic press is and how to operate one.

WPC’s other principal activity is making printing available to those who have worthy causes to advance, but who lack access to mainstream media—a mission that goes to the heart of WPC’s quest for social and economic justice.