[LA] Revolutionary Autonomous Communities' Food Program going strong after a year and five months

reposted from APOC Conference list

Revolutionary Autonomous Communities' Food Program

The Revolutionary Autonomous Communities has created a food program where we are empowering ourselves and others to become self-sustainable.

The Food Program is a mutual-aid project where people themselves are organizing and distributing food in their own neighborhoods. This is not charity, we do not believe that change will happen this way. This is self-empowerment, where working class neo-colonies are feeding themselves, and organizing to feed themselves.

Since the first week of November, 2007, RAC has distibuted much needed grocieries to the needy workers of the area. Last week 200 people standing in line received food packages.

You can join us every Sunday at 1:30 PM. Meet at the SE Corner of Wilshire and Parkview in MacArthur Park.

RAC Mission Statement:

We feel that this system is killing our people by what the corporations feed us or don't feed us. At the same time there is an abundance of healthy food that goes to waste. They would rather let food go to waste than allow the prices of food in the market to drop. Then they disconnect people (all indigenous and colonized people) from the land, which a free and independent people need to survive. They centralize power and resources in the hands of the few, this is how they keep oppressed people dependent on a white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist system.

RAC's Food Program is a way that we can work with supporters and other organizations to feed healthy food to our communities. We want people to connect with each other, to pick up and distribute the food amongst themselves. We will support, help connect people and to supply whatever resources we can. Through this process our goal is to connect our communities and to take them back. Our overall goal is to regain our necessary connection to the land. We need land to survive, and the land belongs to us, not the colonizer. We want to relearn how to live off the land and how to truly be self-sustainable.

We're Still Here, We Never Left

Support our Food Program.

Help Pick Up Food.

Help Distribute Food in Your Neighborhood.

Donate to our Community Mutual-Aid Program.

Get Organized!

Take Back Our Communities and Take Back the Land!

All Power THROUGH the People!

-Revolutionary Autonomous Communities


E-mail RAC:
rac@lists.riseup.net

To donate to the RAC Food Program:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=3639082

RAC Blog:
http://revolutionaryautonomouscommunities.blogspot.com/

Radio RAC LA
Tuesdays 9PM-12AM
http://killradio.org/

[Wales] Protests Against Closing of Community Pools

re-posted from BBC.co.uk

Two Protests at Threatened Pools, 04/19/09

Protests have taken place at two community swimming pools in north and south Wales.

Harlech pool in Gwynedd and one at Treherbert in Rhonda Cynon Taf are both set to close over the next few months.

Gwynedd Council said the Harlech pool had reached the end of its life, while Rhondda Cynon Taf council said funding was behind Treherbert's closure.

However, campaigners say both pools are vital for educational, sport, community leisure, health and tourism needs.

Up to 150 people joined the protest march in Harlech on Sunday afternoon, including EastEnders actress Charlie Brooks, who was brought up in nearby Barmouth and who learnt to swim at the pool.

The protest at Treherbert was due to start at 1630 BST.

The south Wales facility, which last month saw protests by local school children, is scheduled to close its doors to the public on Monday.

The action group which has been campaigning to keep it open says it is only a matter of time before the building becomes a target for vandals.

"If significant damage was caused the pool will never reopen," a spokesman for the group said.

"It seems the RCT council are determined not to assist the action group in refusing to defer the closure of the pool and keep staff at the site to prevent possible intrusion and damage."

The Harlech pool is due to close in June and campaigners say the final decision on its future is imminent.

Gwynedd council said it could not justify spending the £400,000 it needed to bring the building up to standard.

The council wants users to travel to Porthmadog and use the pool there but protestors say it is too far especially for school children who receive lessons as part of school curriculum.

The council has given those interested until the end of June to come up with their own proposals to save the pool.

The Friends of Harlech Swimming Pool issued a statement saying a new report highlights the cost to the local community of closing such a "vital facility."

The report is due to be presented to Gwynedd council board on 28 April.

But the Friends' statement said they had been told by the council that unless a business plan to save the pool was in place by 15 May, the pool will close in June.

[West Virginia] The Art of Being a Neighbor

re-posted from NPR: Weekend Edition/This I Believe

The Art of Being a Neighbor
By Eve Birch, 04/12/09

I used to believe in the American dream that meant a job, a mortgage, cable, credit, warranties, success. I wanted it and worked toward it like everyone else, all of us separately chasing the same thing.

One year, through a series of unhappy events, it all fell apart. I found myself homeless and alone. I had my truck and $56.

I scoured the countryside for someplace I could rent for the cheapest possible amount. I came upon a shack in an isolated hollow, four miles up a winding mountain road over the Potomac River in West Virginia.

It was abandoned, full of broken glass and rubbish. When I pried off the plywood over a window and climbed in, I found something I could put my hands to. I hadn't been alone for 25 years. I was scared, but I hoped the hard work would distract and heal me.

I found the owner and rented the place for $50 a month. I took a bedroll, a broom, rope, a gun and cooking gear, and cleared a corner to camp in while I worked.

The locals knew nothing about me. But slowly, they started teaching me the art of being a neighbor. They dropped off blankets, candles, tools and canned deer meat, and they began sticking around to chat. They'd ask if I wanted to meet cousin Albie or go fishing, maybe get drunk some night. They started to teach me a belief in a different American dream — not the one of individual achievement but one of neighborliness.

Men would stop by with wild berries, ice cream, truck parts and bullets to see if I was up for courting. I wasn't, but they were civil anyway. The women on that mountain worked harder than any I'd ever met. They taught me the value of a whetstone to sharpen my knives, how to store food in the creek and keep it cold and safe. I learned to keep enough for an extra plate for company.

What I had believed in, all those things I thought were the necessary accouterments for a civilized life, were nonexistent in this place. Up on the mountain, my most valuable possessions were my relationships with my neighbors.

After four years in that hollow, I moved back into town. I saw that a lot of people were having a really hard time, losing their jobs and homes. With the help of a real estate broker I chatted up at the grocery store, I managed to rent a big enough house to take in a handful of people.

It's four of us now, but over time I've had nine come in and move on to other places from here. We'd all be in shelters if we hadn't banded together.

The American dream I believe in now is a shared one. It's not so much about what I can get for myself; it's about how we can all get by together.

[Los Angeles] Cul-de-sac Communes

re-posted from NPR: All Things Considered

A Social Experiment: Communes In Cul-De-Sacs
by Jennifer Sharpe, 04/02/09

Ever since my next-door neighbor sent me hate mail, threatening to sue if I didn't cut down my eucalyptus tree, I've been having paranoid fantasies about how badly we'd do together in an apocalypse.

Stranded on a residential street in Santa Monica, Calif., where the neighbors hardly ever interact with each other, I realized we might all die as casualties of our own self absorption.

So when I heard about a social experiment urging people in Los Angeles cul-de-sacs to start communes together, I had to see if this strange suburban mutation could possibly survive.

So architect and social designer Stephanie Smith, who runs the company Ecoshack, took me to the first official cul-de-sac commune potluck at the end of January on a newly developed bluff in Topanga Canyon, three months after she came up with the idea.

"We're finally here," Smith said.

Weeks earlier, Smith sat in her office explaining that she launched her project "Wanna Start A Commune?" after having an epiphany in the first moments of the economy's collapse.

"It couldn't possibly be that I have to keep having to buy in order to be green," Smith said. "I have to buy a Prius. I have to buy a fluorescent light bulb. I have to buy a solar array. And I just frankly just couldn't afford to be green — and that scared me."

Coming together to share resources is the basic premise of Smith's vision for the cul-de-sac commune. Hoping to learn what kinds of tools she should design to help facilitate sharing, Smith listened to Scott Vineberg, who lives in the commune, and his progressive-thinking neighbors as they brainstormed ways to go off the grid together, raise chickens and manage their stress levels.

"I'd like a communal massage, get somebody who comes up, you get a reduced rate, it's all outside... Ahh, that would be amazing, we should do that!" says commune member Helena Kriel.

The stay-at-home convenience of the cul-de-sac commune is, as Smith sees it, a solution to the biggest design flaw of its predecessors.

"In the past, utopian communities have often failed because people who started them have really insisted that the best way is to leave your old community, leave society, leave culture and start over, and it's a valid idea in many cases, but, it also leads to failure," she said. "So what we're interested in doing is make them effective as part of a culture, not a counterculture this time."

By some strange coincidence, the very spot where this first cul-de-sac commune gathering was taking place is exactly where Topanga Canyon's biggest 1970s commune once lived.

And if there's anyone who disagrees with Smith's strategy, it's that commune's founder, Sridhar Silberfein, whose divorce from society has gotten only deeper as his commitment to communal living has grown.

"I think there are going to be more and more people coming into communes — that's really where the future's going to be now," Silberfein says. "Because the economy is really breaking itself down, the government is breaking down, all the systems are breaking down. And all that's going to be left is going to be small communities living together and sharing the land."

I asked him what he imagines will happen to Los Angeles, for example.

"I think big cities are finished," he said. "That's why I left."

I'd driven two and a half hours outside Los Angeles to meet Silberfein, who lives in Yucca Valley, where he works as a real estate agent and is starting a new — as he now calls it — "intentional community," on 85 acres of high desert, where he plans to drill wells and build enormous greenhouses.

But as I looked out over the rocky expanse, I felt a premature nostalgia for civilization, and, despite Silberfein's pessimism, drove back to Los Angeles excited to see if the cul-de-sac communes were catching on.

"Every single neighborhood in America and around the world is a commune," Ecoshack's Smith says. "And every single apartment building is, and every office building is, and every single thing is built new using guidelines around sharing resources. Nothing less than that."

Smith's vision continues to expand. Within a month of that first potluck, at the end of February, cul-de-sac communes were bubbling up around the city, including one down in Santa Monica's Rustic Canyon, a short walk from my house. So perhaps it's just a matter of time before even my block turns, and my hostile tree-hating neighbor comes knocking on my front door.

More information at: www.wannastartacommune.com

[Oakland] Hundreds in the Streets Protest BART Shooting

re-posted from Oakland Tribune: Inside Bay Area, 01/07/09

Hundreds Gather on Oakland Streets to Protest BART Shooting

OAKLAND — Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums has come on the scene, he was surrounded by dozens of protesters and talking with officers trying to quell the situation.

At least 50 police are on scene wearing gas masks, and Oakland's Tactical Operations Team is also on scene but has not been deployed, according to a Tribune reporter on scene.

Property damage has begun to occur, as some windows of businesses have been smashed. The majority of the protesters have been peaceful, but a small group has caused the problems. Traffic is blocked off between Broadway and 13th Street, as well as problems breaking out around Franklin Street near 13th.

The demonstrators from a protest against the fatal BART police shooting of Oscar Grant III took to Oakland streets Wednesday night, lighting fire to a Dumpster near 8th and Madison streets and prompting police to shut down the Fruitvale and Lake Merritt BART stations.

Protesters rammed the Dumpster against a police car, bashing in the front and back windows and denting the passenger side.

Scores of police, including BART police, Oakland Police Department and officers from the Housing Authority responded in special helmets for added protection.

Earlier at the demonstration, Grant's younger sister, Audrena Gilbert, said former officer Johannes Mehserle, who appears in cell phone videos apparently drawing his gun and shooting at an unarmed, restrained Grant on New Year's Day, has not talked to the bereaved family.

"I want him to start. I want him to apologize for what he did," Gilbert, a 19-year-old Oakland woman, said. "I want him to tell the truth, why he shot him, what he shot him for. That's all I want."

The protest was led by speakers for the Coalition Against Police Executions and drew a crowd police estimated as 500 people.

"It's not enough the officer resigned today," said Sean Dugar, president of the California National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth and College Division. "We demand he be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. ... We shut down one BART station this afternoon. Let's do another one next week."

[CA] RAC's Food Program

re-posted from IllVox.org

RAC's Food Program, posted by apoc on December 24, 2008

The Food Program is a mutual-aid project where people themselves are organizing and distributing food in their own neighborhoods. This is not charity, we do not believe that change will happen this way. This is self-empowerment, where working class neo-colonies are feeding themselves, and organizing to feed themselves.

Since the first week of November, 2007, RAC has distibuted much needed grocieries to the needy workers of the area. Las week more than 200 people standing in line received food packages.

You can join us every Sunday at 1:30 PM. Meet at the SE Corner of Wilshire and Parkview in MacArthur Park.

RAC Mission Statement:

We feel that this system is killing our people by what the corporations feed us or don’t feed us. At the same time there is an abundance of healthy food that goes to waste. They would rather let food go to waste than allow the prices of food in the market to drop. Then they disconnect people (all indigenous and colonized people) from the land, which a free and independent people need to survive. They centralize power and resources in the hands of the few, this is how they keep oppressed people dependent on a white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist system.

RAC’s Food Program is a way that we can work with supporters and other organizations to feed healthy food to our communities. We want people to connect with each other, to pick up and distribute the food amongst themselves. We will support, help connect people and to supply whatever resources we can. Through this process our goal is to connect our communities and to take them back. Our overall goal is to regain our necessary connection to the land. We need land to survive, and the land belongs to us, not the colonizer. We want to relearn how to live off the land and how to truly be self-sustainable.

We’re Still Here, We Never Left

Support our Food Program.

Help Pick Up Food.

Help Distribute Food in Your Neighborhood.

Donate to our Community Mutual-Aid Program.

Get Organized!

Take Back Our Communities and Take Back the Land!

All Power THROUGH the People!

-Revolutionary Autonomous Communities (RAC)

Mission Statement:

Who we are. What we believe. What we fight for.

We are a revolutionary federation of community councils & liberated spaces based in oppressed communities made up by oppressed people of color. We are a horizontal organization building self-sustainability and creating the structure, strategy, and program for change through direct participatory forms of organizing and a decision-making process based on consensus. We stand against all forms of oppression: imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism, heterosexism/homophobia/transphobia and the domination of human over human & human over all living things including mother earth. We believe and we fight for autonomy, self determination, self organization & the self defense of our communities.

Our strategy includes outreach and education, community programs, empowerment, support, training and mutual aid, so people can build self reliance & gain the skills, resources and the experience to liberate themselves. In striving for liberation, we work to decolonize our minds by embracing our indigenous roots and practices.

Revolution comes from the people not a vanguard party; it is an individual and collective process where we destroy the system while we create change within ourselves and the world. The best way to show our solidarity to the people of the world is to bring the war home, and to bring down amerikkkan imperialism while we struggle to build internationalism & intercommunalism.

We fight for freedom and won’t settle for less!

All power to the people!

rac@riseup.net