Report from the Campaign: No Callouts
by a CSP civic activist, from a large US city
We partner here with an independently organized Free Store and food distribution center based out of a street-level apartment. The space is rented, not owned - a tenant who provides personal and medical care for their elderly landlord receives the space at wildly low rent in exchange, and has opened it up as a neighborhood community center.
The weekly food distributions tend to go to the local homeless, more and less recent migrants, the elderly, and the working poor (non-mutually exclusive categories). The Store does not ask for ID or collect information about the people who come for food, which is important for the particular social niche it fills [one tiny sliver of]. The city can't service its needy, so the moment the local city council members became aware of the food distribution center, they began sending people to it. They ask the renters who run the Free Store for political endorsements but the Free Store maintains a delicate, friendly neutrality.
The Free Store has to balance fridge space constraints, perishability, and capacity with the donations it receives; often there's more on offer from donors than can be taken. held, and distributed, despite the almost unlimited demand on the receiving end. A bottleneck can occur because of this, in which both perishable resources and civic spirit end up lying unused. It is a common issue today: More is available to be given than can be managed and distributed by the city, NGOs, and independent community groups, combined, at their current level of capacity. I feel both challenged and excited by my general observation that, rather than being defined by scarcity and conflict, the neighborhoods around me are characterized by a great deal of agreement and resources which, lacking a working civic vessel to hold and carry them, lie motionless but radiating potential energy.
The Free Store, a mini-scale sprout of a solution to this problem, is open to anyone. Local parents stop by to make sure neighborhood kids who come home with free items aren't shoplifting -- they imagine a "free store" must be a tall tale out of a child's imagination. A Free Store volunteer says this is one of the most common mechanisms by which he meets adults in the neighborhood.
The Free Store volunteers manage friction between the established homeless population and incoming migrants in the line outside the store on food distribution days. The Free Store has also, accidentally, found itself assisting undocumented people who have been victims of crime to safely make use of laws that ought to (but often do not) protect their ability to report assaults and other violent crimes against them to the police without exposing themselves to deportation. Some community groups who make use of the Free Store space may advocate police abolition, conceptually, but the Free Store volunteers recognize a need for more police involvement in immediate local problems of public safety. This "service" in crime reporting is a form of self-assistance, as the Free Store volunteers too must be able to walk through their own neighborhood.
Total openness is one reason the Free Store is cool and different. The Free Store does not espouse or display, or ask its volunteers or those who come for food and supplies to espouse or display, some set of "correct" positions or certain cultural markers to be included. This is not the norm. Independent civic life in our city, reflecting back from and onto local NGOs and local politics, is dominated by cultural societies. A great deal of civic activity is done by churches, which draw people in by religious-cultural affinity. Another significant portion of existing civic activity is done by community and cultural centers based around specific ethnic and ethno-religious groups. A final, smaller portion of civic activity is done by progressives and leftists on the basis of political affinity, which here in a one-party City is really another form of narrow cultural affinity. These last groups will start from a basis of openness to anyone and then begin the carve-outs -- no landlords, no cops, no one who voted for X political candidate. The Free Store exists in the first place precisely because it does not draw such lines, and it gains strength from continuing not to draw them.
When not doing food distributions, the Free Store has opened the space up to allow a variety of community uses, from language exchanges to classes for kids to self defense lessons to open mics. It partners easily with other community groups who borrow the space, and doesn't particularly vet them. The Store is basically supportive of all civic activity that anyone might want to do. When it comes to politics, however, the Free Store guards its neutrality -- it does not call attention to itself, not as a way of "influencing" politics, and not as a mechanism for garnering new support. If some neighborhood kids want to do a protest, they can borrow the tables at the Free Store to make their posters, but the Free Store will not lend its name to the effort. It makes one request of groups who use the space: "please check with us first before you call anyone out from here."
This is an earned position. Not so long ago, a group of young activists who were borrowing space at the Free Store began a public campaign "calling out" the local city council representative on some political basis. On their flyers, posters, and materials, they used the name of the Free Store. Shortly thereafter, the Free Store was raided by law enforcement, and then shut down for a time pending an investigation by the city into whether it is operating a business without a license. The Free Store had to beg and reassure the local city council that it meant them no harm to be allowed to reopen. We learned from this, "no call outs."
The Free Store's position of quiet, neutral operation is also special and smart in many ways, and actually no sacrifice at all. Typically, self-identified "activism" in this City focuses on maximum publicity at the outset, even for very weak and nascent efforts, creating immediately a dangerous ratio of risk to participants versus any minor early rewards of civic activity. This lends itself to maximum disillusionment, quick flares and burnings out of energy, and the abandonment of many independent activist projects within (we have observed) a cycle of about two years. I haven't settled on a metaphor but right now I've got "kamikaze puffer fish activism" to describe this phenomenon. You sort of inflate yourself momentarily to create a false impression of strength, juke your numbers, go for quantity over quality. Then you fling yourself at a perceived social enemy. (A normal puffer fish wouldn't do this, of course- it has the puffer feature precisely to avoid head to head combat.) CSP has always sought to "go its own way", not publicly call out existing powers which are far better organized than we are, because no matter how aggressively this calling out is done it is really a form of begging. Kamikaze puffer fish activism also has, we have found, extremely limited appeal to most working people, who live with a certain real precarity here and are not interested in risk for its own sake. It also has, ultimately, extremely little positive, concrete, or lasting impact, externally or in terms of the self-development and learning of civic activists. It's hard to learn once you are, civically speaking, dead.
By contrast, the Free Store makes its choices carefully, giving it breath to maintain and strengthen itself within the highly territorial political-business-gang-NGO landscape of the city relatively undisturbed and with minimal risk. This has nothing to do with a lack of imagination for a transformed society in the future - quite the opposite! - It is a level-headed assessment of the state of civic play now, and the level of self-organized independence that would be necessary to change it. Likewise, the Free Store's openness to working people regardless of their political stances shows a far greater potential for organizing toward truly independent civic strength than activist efforts that aim to organize the small sliver of the working, breathing city that is in political (really cultural) agreement with the activists themselves.
CSP civic activists are excited to continue to learn from and support the Free Store!