In 2020, facing the combined crises of both the pandemic and rising homelessness, a group of community organizers started a mutual aid network to address needs we saw in the community. We started gathering donations from far and wide, cooking meals, and distributing the supplies and food we collected with those most in need. Through this work we began to meet and form relationships with those we fed and ate with. We began to organize nightly mobile meal deliveries in downtown Aberdeen, eviction defense for homeless camp sweeps, and started participating in harm reduction programs. We have lost many friends to the streets, we have cried together almost as much as we have laughed and eaten together. But through communal conversations and meetings we can see a way forward in this struggle; we have found each other in the darkness, and by organizing together we have come to learn what we need and how to get it.
In doing our mutual aid work we have become painfully aware of specific needs both for the community, and for the growth of our own projects. Some have been obvious since the beginning, such as a community kitchen for preparing large meals, and a space for holding meetings and workshops. Others have only revealed themselves through years of community organizing such as medical clinics, and legal aid. Some are continuations of work we’ve been doing, like harm reduction and food delivery. Others are big and new ideas for our collective, such as an eco-village and a shelter for both temporary and permanent cooperatively owned housing. After another winter losing people we love to the streets, and with a hostile political climate in town, the need is clear. We now endeavor to yet again solve our own problems. If we need safe spaces to exist, live, and thrive….we must build them. If we want stability for our community…we must obtain it ourselves.
So we have spent many months debating, calculating, meeting, and developing this plan for a community home base that starts to meet our needs. We hope you join us in realizing this dream and pushing our radical love and collective care to new heights. There are no limits to how involved you can get. Whether you have time, money, or creativity to contribute we are always looking for new collaborations and co-conspirators. As a community-powered grassroots project, Blackflower couldn’t exist without folks like you!
Our plan is two fold: the property would be divided into two separate sections. The public-facing section would be dedicated to the social center, the rest of the property to the rear would be the eco-village where residents would live. The social center side will be where we centralize community resources, and the self governed eco-village would have immediate access to those shared resources of the community. The social center would serve as a business incubator for various community initiatives, and resident’s personal small businesses. It would also be the central hub for preparing and serving food, with an internet cafeteria and community kitchen. Space will be dedicated to a mutual aid depot, for storage and distribution of supplies used in our ongoing mutual aid work on and off site. Spaces would also be set aside for future projects such as legal and medical clinics, a union meeting hall, and many mixed use spaces for workshops, maker/art spaces, as well as spaces for rent to the public. We want the social center to cater to the wider community beyond just the eco-village, drawing people from the region to a unique space where they can interact with and participate in new models of economics, design, community and education.
As part of the eco-village campus we will offer permaculture design courses for people to learn how to design their own properties, as well as offering professional permaculture design services to regional property owners who want to hire someone to design their property for them. The eco-village will not only serve as a practical solution to lack of housing but also a learning center where permaculture design concepts are experimented with and taught. Education is a large part of the goal of this project, beyond design courses we want to have music, history, STEM, and political education as part of a holistic unschooling program, where people generate their own curriculum and pace their own learning. The eco-village campus will be built by and for it’s residents using cheap natural building techniques in order to provide each person their own warm, safe, dignified living space. Transitional or permanent, this housing would serve as a stable base from which to build a community based on resilience, skill sharing, learning, and love.
The social center side of our plan, along with most of what we do as humans, centers around preparing and enjoying food together. So much of what we have accomplished in terms of building community over the last few years has been through feeding people. It’s an innately intimate act of trust and care both to offer food to someone and to accept it. It is our firm belief that the best meeting table is a dinner table, conversations happen, plans are laid, bonds are formed, and community is formed. Food is the maintenance of our bodies and centering it’s production and consumption as the core of a community has been the basis for human social structure for thousands of years. Recognizing it’s importance, not only to our own selves, but to our collective struggle, we have chosen to put the act of feeding each other at the front and center of this social center project.
Our communal kitchen will be busy all day every day making meals for the community. The cafeteria will be a spot to hang out and grab a bite to eat, jump on a free computer, or grab a book to read from the bookstore and retreat to the cozy reading nook. There would also be a grocery shop for picking up ingredients to cook at home or a snack for the road. Both the grocery shop, and the kitchen will benefit from the many community gardens growing fresh produce. A FabLab and makerspace, full of a variety of tools and equipment for a multitude of projects, will help turn that raw produce into value added products available for sale as well. A small business/non profit incubator will help community members take charge of their own futures by providing resources to get their business ideas off the ground. Residents will benefit from access to the vast tool library for routine maintenance of the land and infrastructure, the maker space for building and creating new infrastructure, and a micro lending service will help individuals in paying for things the social center doesn’t provide, as well as helping to fund small business start ups.
The social center really shines when it comes to bringing our community together, and one way it does that incredibly effectively is by hosting meetings and workshops. The union hall will give life to our struggles by providing a safe space to organize and meet in. Many of the educational initiatives regional convergences organized by the learning center can also be hosted here. The eco-village will be a private residential area, but the social center is designed to bring people in from the wider public, to be a space of public demonstration of our values. To this end we will host public events and workshops. Besides renting space for private events, public cookouts, game nights, book clubs, and seasonal celebrations will be a regular part of the social center calendar. Our hope is not to silo ourselves off but to engage with the public and let them examine our projects and ideas for themselves to see the benefits inherent in them. We want to be able to use the food, art, projects, and resources generated and practiced on site to inspire and show people the beauty in the radical ideas that we use. This seems to be the most effective way to get people to realize that these ideas hold value and can directly and immediately benefit their lives by putting them into practice.
What is Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network?
Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network is a grassroots group of community members in so-called Grays Harbor County, WA engaged in political direct action. We are not a Non-Profit 501c3, a business, or a club. We are normal people who try to organize the vast potential of our community to build the world we want to see, without asking for permission.
Our goal is to create mutual aid projects that meet the needs of the communities and identify affiliate groups in need of amplification, assistance, or support. We also work directly with the community to find needs, gaps in services, and resources in need of distribution. Our main projects are currently centered in food sovereignty and advocacy for the unhoused but we hope to see many diverse projects evolving out of this work. We also network outside the region through affiliated organizations who provide both resources and inspiration for this project.
In the face of rising climate chaos, and political authoritarianism, mutual aid is our best bet for caring for each other in disaster scenarios, natural or anthropogenic. While most of our community faces daily disasters in the form of city sweeps, police harassment, and the criminalization of poverty, we also must be prepared for future climate catastrophe. We have long needed adquate and accessible storage for our mutual aid supplies, in order to grow this project and maintain enough stock to see us through a potential disaster, we will require much more storage space for supplies. We need to be able to stockpile rainy day supplies to be distributed to the public as needed in the case of a local disaster scenario. We also need enough space to store supplies for our ongoing work in the community both on and off site. With a proper mutual aid depot we could both furnish food, hygiene, clothing, and medical supplies for our continued mutual aid work, as well as ensure enough stock in the event of supply chain issues, or natural disaster. We hope to be able to leverage the stores of supplies to offer to the wider community and be able to play a critical role in keeping people safe when things go wrong.
Storytelling is one of the most elementary human social activities. For most of human history oral storytelling was the only way information was passed from generation to genreation. This history has been carried through to every social struggle as well. Whatever the medium of the day, people have consistently used stories to inform and influence those struggles. Whether through folk songs, printed pamphlets, or radio broadcasts; us and our intelletual ancestors have relied on media tools to tell stories that connect the poor and working class, while delineating lines of conflict between ruling and working classes. When a community looses the ability to tell its own stories, it is essentially silenced. We must carry this tradition of storytelling into our modern day by using the vast media resources avaliable to us. We must use these media platofrms as tools to tell the stories that arent being heard in our communities. The voices of the most vulnerable can and should inform our current approaches to revolutinary struggles.
In order to tell the untold stories of our community, it’s challenges and it’s beauty, our social center will also house our media collective, Sabot Media. We will use this platform to tell our stories, and to investigate the local politcal machinations that cast such a shadow over our lives. This reporting will be published, printed, and distributed by our zine distro, analyzed and connected to global struggles in our podcast, and a quartly newsletter will collect wider regional updates to maintain awareness of our rural struggles for an outside audience. Besides updating folx on our goings on, we will use these platforms for political education and local radical history projects. Through a careful examination of the past, and by delving into radcial texts in our book club, we hope to inform future organizing and projects.
There will be a recoding studio for video and audio production of media peices promoting our projects, discussing local events, and investigating local events. We will report on local politicians and their actions and hold our leaders to account for their inactions as well. We will use the social center’s makerspace to publish, print, and distribute these reports through our zine distro. These reports will also form the backbone of our audio and video projects. A podcast will pull together our local stories and global sturggles and analyze how they ineract and connect. A YouTube channel will provide us a venue for deeper exlorations of in depth topics that impact our movement and our collective. We will be working with regional parnters to assemble articles, art, and peotry into a quarterly newsletter, providing updates to an outside audience in order to maintain awareness of our rural struggles. By telling the stories that we have heard in doing this work, the stories that drews us in in the first place, we hope to induce others to get involved in their own community organizing initiatives. We also hope this efforts can serve to form wider networks of connection and solidarity throughout the movement community we are a part of.
Another aspect of the social center is the union hall. With housing being one of, if not the most, pressing needs our community faces, we must have an organization that is focused on changing the conditions by which people obtain and keep housing. Let’s be clear, this does not mean we want public housing anymore than we want rent vouchers. What we want is free and accessible housing for all, by us and for us. We don’t want to sit by while others decide what is best for us. We want ownership over the direction our movement goes. A union can provide the structure needed to rally the unhoused and unstably housed among us to actions aimed at securing this future for ourselves. With a large meeting hall we can convene community meetings for the management of the eco-village, as well as holding union meetings, and offering the space for rent when available to other comunity groups who need space to come together. Prisoner support is important to our mission as well since we have solidarity with those facing incarceration. By prviding help with community service, parole coordination, and transportation we can help people stay in their community instead of being locked in a cage.We do not simply want to be included in the housing market we want to abolish it and build a system that houses everyone in its place. So that no one should ever be homeless again.
We have operated and will continue to operate our harm reduction services, but we also acknowledge that harm reduction is as much a solution to our needs as is a tourniquet on a gunshot wound. What we need is wholistic, free health care for all. We will bring professional medical workers to hold free clinics and provide needed medical trainings. We also hope to have vehicles ready to respond to calls rapidly in order to intervene in situations where a 911 call can’t be made for fear of arrest or deportation. One of the largest areas of need we see everyday is health care. Living on the streets is dangerous and exposes people to many risks and very few resources for cleaning or tending to wounds. Many people are either unwilling or unable to get care at a hosptial, leading to more serious health implications. Our community faces many hurdles to accessing good quality health care, resulting in early and unnecessary deaths and sicknesses, easily prevented by modern health care. Mental health care is equally as important to our well being. We can provide space for peope to access free mental healtch care. By bringing in teachers in conjucntion with the social center we can also learn the practices that can keep us healthy and safe. Allowing us a larger degree of autonomy, and the ability to turn around and provide that care to the community. We will learn community responses to mental health, trama response, substance use, viruses, and anything else that comes our way.
Another arena in which we face a lot of challenges is within the criminal justice system. There are so many ways in which vulnerable population such as the homeless come into contact with the legal system. We also recognize the disproportionate affect laws have in punishing poor people. Whether its passing anti homeless ordinances or merely the constant patrolling of known encampments, people on the streets are exposed to more interactions with law enforcement than the average person through no fault of their own. Through the same circumstances they are also exposed to more acts of harm and crime than most. Theses facts leave our community at increase risk of legal issues without proper representation at their disposal. We will need to provide traditional legal aid for interfacing with the State’s criminal systems. We will bring in lawyers to hold free legal clinics and know your rights trainings so that whatever challenges we face, we are prepared to meet them head on. We will incorporate lawyers and legal funds into our collective so that our community can have access to competent and dedicated legal representation when necessary. Without appropriate models for resolving disputes and achieving real justice we will always be reliant on the cruel and punitive methods of so called justice imposed by the state. In order to keep ourselves and community safe, we must develop our own models of mediation and conflict resolution based in the practices of transformative justice and community accountability, where parties are brought together to reach a consensual definition of justice in each unique situation. By learning and practicing these transformative methods of justice we can model new ways of addressing harm in our communities without the police or courts.
Perhaps the biggest project in our plan is the eco-village campus. This portion of our land will not be open to the public as it will serve to house any residents who want a spot to live and build. We will surround those wanting to live here with all the assistance they require to design, build, and furnish their own homes. Our goal is to have a place where someone can come and learn the permaculture design techniques to develop a plan for a home. Obtain the necessary techincal advice to permit and build said home. Have access to the required tools and building materials to do so, as well as assisting with labor and maintainence. This way will provide an incredible sense of ownership over the home and in depth knowledge on how to repair and maintain it. By living on site they would have immediate access to any and all services provided by the ocial center, as well as far safer and healthier living conditions than are provided by the city on the streets. By choosing to reside in the village residents would automatically become board members of the communty land trust which would hold the physical land in common for the residents. The village would be permitted through the planned development process allowing for increased density while preserving common open spaces. The land would held in common while each lot and the home on it would be the property of the resident. By being made up solely of people living on the land, this trust would ensure that individuals have actual ownership in and direct control over the operations of their village.
“The educator has the duty of not being neutral.”
– Paulo Freire
Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschoolers learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. We will use this eco village as a learning center to see how far we can push our educational goals, developing a campus for revolutionary course work and study. As well as hosting a convergence space for bringing in other groups to network and community build from across the globe. We will all engage in teaching, learning, and growing together to set our community up for success by sharing skills among participants, cross training, and exploring radical texts in reading groups to inform lesson content. We cant stop at learning design concepts, we will need educational courses in every subject from history to math.
Our social, political, and environmental, and economic system are not broken…
but they are poorly designed. They acheive the goal they were designed for – short term profit – but because the design was ad hoc, haphazard, and inequitable they leave many in poverty while promoting a very small number to unimaginable wealth. It is beyond obvious to merely state that these systems are not sustainable. But the next step is realizing that they can be redesigned by us. As humans we can design much better system when we introduce ethical considerations into the core of the design process, this gives us permaculture or ethical design. But again this seems to fall short as we see a variety of examples of a right wing fascist creep into the permaculture community, and the community itself seems ill prepared to counter this trend. As a possible hope to resist this we would like to introduce a new concept: Anaculture, or anarcho-permaculture. It is our desire to develop this theorictal approach by experimentation and trials. Taking the uniquely anti authoritarian ethics of the anarchist intellctual tradition and combining it the already established library of permacultre techniques we want to fortify the future of these design movements against fascist infiltration. We want to be able to offer courses in design, not only for your garden or farm project but for anything. Workplaces can be designed, political action campaigns can be designed, life systems, water systems, our very future can be designed by us, today. These courses will be avaliable to the public as well on a sliding scale basis. Additionally we will be offering anyone who graduates as a resident an opportunity to join our design team in offering professional design services to the wider region.
Design allows us to participate in the creation of all sorts, when applied to culture, it is the ability to create one’s own culture as you see fit. There is much to learn from the past, but we must not be subservient to it, we can change our ways when it suits us. Permaculture gives a good path forward for attacking any problem head on. It is direct action, it is revolutionary. By designing a permanent culture built on anarchist ideals we can promise a future to the next seven generations and begin to heal the wounds caused by such poorly designed system as we ave today. We believe that any ethically designed system must reject authoritarianism and embrace universal emancipation, both for human and non human systems. There is no compatibility between the ethics of permaculture and the far right worldview. For this reason and more we feel it necessary to promote this distinct theory as a guide for those wanting to practice and learn design concepts that we can use to liberate our planet, redesign our world, and create a new world in the shell of the old.