Rural Organizing Part 2 Ft. Andrew and Black Flower Collective

Andrew and Mia finish our chat with Black Flower Collective and discuss connecting rural and urban organizers and the benefits of sharing resources and knowledge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. Joining me
again for this second part of two parts. Ryan and
Sprout from the Black Flower Collective in Aberdeen, Washington, as
they've joined us to discuss the dichotomy between urban and
rural political organizing. Last week spoke, they gave us some

(00:27):
background on exactly how the black Flower Collective began and
what sort of motivating factors they have been in their
developments as an organization, as well as some of the
dichotomies that they've experience between urban and rural political organizing.
Now we're going to take a moment to explore some

(00:48):
of the materials, some of the other material conditions that
they have faced in their city, or rather in their
small town Charian. As we were talking about in the
last episode, there's a huge difference between the modes of
socialization UM in big cities and then versus small towns
like our own, you know, peer we socialize more like

(01:12):
in our houses. You meet friends at at the homes
of other friends houses, where in the bigger cities it's
more so that you know, you went to a club,
you went to an event, concert, class, what I have
you UM And these are definitely things that like evolved

(01:34):
and developed based on the you know, just different material conditions.
Like you know, there's not as many classes around here
and you know, events and stuff like that because a
people just don't have the money to go to them
and be there. Nobody has the money that really put
them on or you know, any of that's a startup capital. Um.

(01:55):
There's not enough money coming through the town. That's why
the far right are always trying to push this homeless narrative,
because they're trying to make like turn this town into
like a tourist town or something, which makes no goddamn
sense to me. There's nothing in this town to come
here for us, But like the only reason you're coming
to this town is because you're driving through here to
go to the ocean. That's it, Like the highway dumps

(02:17):
out here and then it's old highways that back to
the rest of the ocean. Sounds pretty isolated. It can
be pretty isolating out here, but it doesn't disconnect us
from the overall struggle. Throughout our organizing, we've discovered that
there's a lot of things that we can do for
urban comrades through our mutual aid. For example, rural people

(02:43):
can do anything that is virtual, such as graphic design
or web support. We can also offer up rural spaces
for rest and recuperation for front light activists in urban areas.
While we might not be present in the heat of battle,
we can make our isolation of strength, as often people
abused directly by the system require peace and solitude to

(03:07):
recover from such travel. We can also use our local
networks to identify enemies and report this to the wider
radical community out here. There is a huge number of
out here, and in the Pacific Northwest in general, there's
a huge number of white supremacists and neo Nazi militias

(03:29):
and organizations, and so they generally organize in small towns
like Aberdeen. You see a lot of that here, and
so people living in those towns bear the responsibility, we
think of reporting on the activities of those groups to
the wider community, because a lot of times what you

(03:51):
see is, you know, it's kind of like the police
coming in from the suburbs. The extremist often come in
from the outlying rural areas, either in protest scenarios or
you know, usually in protest scenarios. We saw a couple
instances in which our local writing neo Nazi group went

(04:17):
out to Chaz and was filming videos out there and
collecting information for their organizing back here. So we can
also be doing the same throughout the interim and collecting
information on those groups for our comrades and urban areas.
Right right. That sounds like some really viable and pouts

(04:38):
and weeeze to to build that sense of Uban rule solidarity. Yeah, yeah,
because there's definitely a lot of people out here that
need some notes taken on them. Um. For example, during
the height of the twenty twenty protests, there was a
small solidarity protest that was essentially are just five women

(05:01):
that you know, holding a couple of signs, and which
resulted in a line of reactionaries and their assault rifles,
the you know, the harassinge threatening this very small group
of women of you know, if it says saying how
Antifa was coming to the town and they were going
to burn the town down and all this stuff. Um,

(05:21):
you got people like uh in Walla, Walla, for example,
you have Henry Contrera who utilizes what connections and whatnot
that he has out there to like call other white
supremacists around the nation and would essentially be like, hey,
you know, move here, We'll get you a job, we'll
get you a house, we'll get you all set up.

(05:43):
Just come here and organize with us. And we kind
of have our own version of that here in Aberdeen
with Cash McCullum, a leader of the Pacific Northwest wolf Pack,
our local neo Nazi group and people like that. I
think it's only just them, that it's a whole group,

(06:04):
that there are a whole social setting that follows them,
and us being in rural communities, are going to have
the best opportunity to keep tabs on that kind of
stuff and warn the wider community. Great, yeah, that's that's
absolutely vital. And you know, one of my questions i'd
prepared incoming to meet with your I was going to ask, actually,

(06:26):
you know, how can we avoid this sort of idea
that a lot of people have in their heads, all
radicals have in their heads, the sort of the distant
commune and trap. You know, this idea that you know,
radicals they move out to the country, they set up
the happy the commune. It either falls apart into a
cult or just like pulls away from the broader struggle.

(06:49):
But it seems like in some ways you'll have been
able to utilize that distance as a sort of a strength.
And you've spoken quite a bit about how real communities
different ways they've been able to help. Uban communities in
the brought a struggle. But now I guess I want
to tune the tune the tables a bit and ask
what sort of we as Uban radicals can support the

(07:14):
struggles within rural communities. Well, one way that we've seen
a lot of solidarity from urban comrades has been in
the topic of harm reduction. It's really hard to access
services out here where we're at. There's really only one
player in town and they are highly bureaucratic, and the

(07:38):
line to get any sort of social service from them
is a mile long. Also fun note that Cash McCollum,
person I talked about earlier, is on the board for
that social service as well as long as as well
as other people who are part of the soap group. Yeah,
so we've seen a large show solidarity from urban commrades

(08:00):
sending us harm reduction supplies such as Narcana, which has
literally saved dozens of lies since we started that program.
Healthcare in general is a tough issue for rural areas,
transportation distances, lack of providers, lack of services, all of
those things compound to make it really difficult to get

(08:24):
appropriate healthcare, and so anytime anyone has any actual injury
in town, they just send them to Seattle and right
our hospitals out here are really terrible, and so training,
I think would be a really vital need that we
could benefit from a lot out here. If we could
get these sort of medical collectives and the harm reduction

(08:46):
collectives that exist in these more urban areas to conduct
rural training workshops, I think that that would be a
huge benefit to not only just Aberdeen, any rural area
that that was to take place in, because that would
allow those communities to start employing harm reduction and general

(09:11):
first aid in their communities and prevent transportation out to
these more metro areas. Yeah, the more we could do
skill shares, the more we could do workshops, the more
we could do radical classes or anything under the idea
of kind of unschooling that we could do for rural

(09:32):
communities is imperative because the outside of high school, unless
you're going to college for something specific, there's just not
much for learning out here. What about the next generation.

(09:53):
What about that site of struggle in education. Well, I
believe Sprout could probably delve into this a bit more,
but I definitely would say that our ideas for you know,
educations in the next generation, as much as everything kind
of goes under this I forget the name of it,

(10:15):
but it's this idea of the like seven years generation
in our planning and the like what what would this
look like for the next x seven generations? Right, seven
generations sustainability, well, seven generations stewardship, as another team used.
I think education is central to a community. It's really

(10:37):
the same sort of you know, you're going to get
the same answer with all of these healthcare, addiction, poverty,
they're all into related out here. And because education is
so crucial, we have focused the black Flower Collectives initiatives
on a lot of educational programs. So we're trying to

(10:58):
get this space set up so that we can start
having some revolutionary course works that we can offer there.
We would really like to develop it into a real
campus for learning, both for youth programs and for like
continuing education GD and college level kind of stuff. We

(11:21):
think that the unschooling method is pretty cool where people
can kind of just pace their own learning and decide
what it is they want to learn. So that's the
method that we would go with. And we think that
that allows for a lot more diversity in the styles
of learning that are employed, and through that you can

(11:42):
kind of learn, you can kind of learn new ways
of learning, I guess, which helps add resilience to any community.
And I think that a lot of those skills offered
at a place like that, Like like Sherry I was saying,
skill shares, I think a lot of that could come

(12:03):
from We'll need to come from urban communities because we
don't have a lot of that out here of our right,
so hopefully right get our when we get our space
set up, we can host all manner of gatherings and
start bridging that divide between the rural and the urban. Yeah,
And I mean I've been looting more about your space,

(12:23):
little bit of research on it, you know, prior to
the episode, and we stood food started token very inspiring stuff,
very much in the ving of something that I plan
on doing locally here and turn on to be who
let's pretend that this is les, pretend this is a
revolutionary version of shock tac all right, Like let's just

(12:45):
pretend this is an anarchist shock tac. Give me your
eleviateor pitch for this space, Like, what is the plan there? Okay?
Our plan is twofold. The property would be divided into
two separate sections. The public facing section would be dedicated
to the social Center we've been speaking of, and the
rest of the property would be what we're calling an

(13:07):
eco village where residents would live. The Social center will
be where we centralize community resources, and the self governed
eco village would have immediate access to those shared resources.
The plan is to run the Social center as a
bit of a small business incubator for various community initiatives

(13:28):
that we've been talking about, and as well for the
residents of the eco village to start their own small
person of businesses, because in our discussions with people on
the streets, you know, everyone has an idea of how
to make money, and it's just always some small barrier
like paperwork or permits that gets in the way of

(13:50):
them starting to have their own income and that sense
of independence. So we want to be able to help
with that. Also obviously be a central hub for preparing
and serving food, which has been the basis of all
of our organizing so far is the coming together and
sharing of meals. We want to have an Internet cafeteria

(14:11):
and a community kitchen there. We would also host hold
space for the Mutual Aid Network to store supplies and
conduct its work both on and offsite. We want to
have enough space to have a meeting hall for potential
unions and start pushing on the unionization locally with the IWW.

(14:39):
All of these spaces would be rentable to the public.
So the union hall, for example, would be a great
venue for an event that someone wanted to throw, or
perhaps the wedding even and so that could be one
source of revenue for the social center, as well as
the book keeping, the back end book keeping services that

(15:01):
we're going to have as part of the business incubator,
and the permaculture design services that we're going to have
as part of the eco village. The release sounds like
a lot of the different ideas I've had confusion on
my channel for some time now. You know, this idea
of a sort of a library economy, in this idea

(15:23):
of the eco villages, the sort of public culture spieces
and moods and centers of cunity outreach and education. I'd
be lying if I didn't say say that that we're
a huge fan of your channel. Actually appreciate that, appreciate that,
and I'm honestly in tune. This project is something that

(15:44):
really inspires me as well. Yeah, I'd like to say
that none of this is from us. We've taken so
much inspiration from other projects to cobble together this plan that, Yeah,
it's been a real joy to just go through all
of everyone else's different content and kind of see like, oh,

(16:06):
this could fit with that, and this could fit with that,
and come up with a plan that we really think
could start to solve some of these issues that we're
seeing in town. Right. I think that's the real one
of the few beauties of the Internet these days, you know,
the fact that it's still able to connect people and
ideas from all over. For the police, yeah, for sure,

(16:27):
I wanted to ask, as you mentioned these sort of
equal villages and that that whole idea having spaces for
housing and benefitting the people in that community, developing that
sort of sense of interdependence. I wanted to you know,
you can't really talk about urban and rural rule and

(16:49):
urban without bringing up the fact that urbanization, you know,
seems to ever crawl into the rural space. You know,
like there's always this sense of the encroachment of the
city on the surrounding rural regions. What do you what
is your teak on that? Yeah, it does seem to

(17:10):
be a one way street. I think the model that
we're trying to push is one of d growth where
you would see sort of a reversal of that trend
of gentrification or urbanization and you would see more of
like a ruralizing of urban spaces to start having more

(17:31):
green spaces, more growing of their own food, and more
production of agricultural products right there in the urban centers, right,
you know, which is kind of what we want to
do with the eco village is provide a bit of
a model for how community organizing, of how a community

(17:57):
could organize itself around ecological principles, prefigurative politics and action exactly.
Another note that I guess I want to bring up
before we start to come to the clues is, you know,
again we've been speaking a lot about the urban and
the rule, but one element excepted, you know, sort of

(18:18):
a passing sense of our discussion of the police. One
element that's kind of been lost in that and that
I know people might be asking about just what about
the suburbs, you know, like, do you see a space
for organizing there way as that fit into that urban rule?
That caught to me. What sort of focus is do
you think suburban organizays might want to tackle? Well, I

(18:41):
think suburban comrades are probably gonna have a bit of
both worlds, as it were, because they're not in the
downtown core of a city where most protests or sites
and struggle happen. But they're also not out in the
boonies in a rural environment, so you know, they might

(19:06):
have police that are a bit more preoccupied with the
actual community and actually from the community, and so they
might need to take some lessons from the rural center
or from the rural areas in that regard and try
to diversify their group into multiple different roles, multiple different channels,

(19:30):
so that they are having continuous backlash against a group
that's just trying to feed the homeless. But at the
same time, you know, they have a lot of resources
that rural people don't have access to, and so they
could be coming into rural areas and providing those same
sort of trainings and workshops that urban comrades could and

(19:53):
they could also be going into urban centers and learning
and providing workshops and skill shares. In those scenarios, I
think they're kind of a maybe play a bit of
a buffer zone between the two. So what does the

(20:16):
future look like from Black Fowl Collective? You know what
projects you're planning on tacklin in the end, now, a
couple of months from now, a few years down the line,
and how can folks support well. Right now, we are
definitely focused on securing funding. The housing market is horrible.
Property prices prices are going up, and when there is

(20:39):
a good deal on something, it's gone usually within a day,
within hours. So we are definitely full focused on fundraising
right now. We need to have the money on hand
to be able to jump on a piece of property
when it comes up, because we need a good deal
and we need a good amount of land to make
sure that we have the room to grow and build

(21:01):
various projects in the future. Yeah, So the projects that
we're focusing on right now immediately is the Perma Culture
design services, and so if anyone wants to have us
design their farm or garden or house or balcony, they

(21:21):
can go to Blackflower Permaculture dot Noblogs dot org and
get started through that process there. Hopefully, once we get land,
as you were saying, in the next five years, the
perma culture Design services can grow into a perma culture
design course that we could actually start offering people to

(21:44):
come and do, like a two week intensive study on
the building techniques that we're using on site in the
eco village and on how to apply those back at home.
Another project that we're currently working on is the bookkeeping.
This is sort of the bedrock of the business admin

(22:08):
side of things that we're going to be folding into
the business incubator once we get that going, and we
are looking into a couple of different grants for that.
But as Sherry and said, you know, right now we're
focused on fundraising, so we are. We do have a
couple of different platforms that we're collecting donations from and
we are starting to plan a few benefit shows here

(22:32):
locally in Aberdeen. So if anyone is in a band
and wants to roll through and play a show for us,
you know, that would be much appreciated, and then they
can just get a hold of us through our website
so our role in black Flower is trying to spread
awareness help with this fundraising. Gave them kind of free

(22:55):
advertisement in order to help their growth sprout and our
podcast moltop Now are from the Sabo Media Collective which
once things are going with good with black Flower, we're
hoping to be housed by them to help grow our
media efforts. But if another good way to help in

(23:17):
supporting black Flower is to go to our website at
Sabo Sabot Media dot Noblogs dot org and share our
podcast moltop now. Check us out on social media on
whatever social media you are on. From Collectiva masted onto

(23:40):
Facebook at Aberdeen Local thirteen twelve. We have articles that
we write on the Harbor Rat Report and a whole
host of other content for people to check out and
share with donation links that all go to black Flowers efforts.
That's fantastic and I would encourage folks to check out
what they're doing and all these different platforms and well,

(24:03):
that's been it for it could happen here. It's been
great to have you both from black Flower Collective. I've
been your host for today, Andrew of the YouTube channel
Andrewism which you can follow YouTube dot com. Slash andrewism
on Twitter at underscore Saint True, and on Peter dot

(24:25):
com slash Saint True. All power to all the people
that's have you. Thanks for having us, thank for being on.
Thank you guys, great recording with you. It Could Happen
here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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(24:47):
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