Homeless Organizing in Oakland and Rural Relief After Helene

This week on the show we’re featuring two inteviews. First up, you’ll hear from Freeway, a houseless activist in Oakland, CA, about the recent series of sweeps of homeless being promoted by Governor Gavin Newsom. Freeway has been a member of Wood Street Commons and is now a member of Oakland Homeless Union (IG or donate).

• OHU Transcript
• OHU PDF (Unimposed)
• OHU Zine (Imposed PDF)

Then, Janet of Rural Organizing and Resilience (IG or donate) in Madison County, speaks about post-Hurricane Helene organizing and disaster preparedness in the mountains of Western North Carolina. More and links to be added soon.

• ROAR Transcript
• ROAR PDF (Unimposed)
• ROAR Zine (Imposed PDF)

Other groups mentioned by Janet of ROAR include:

• Holler Harm Reduction
• PODER Emma
• Appalachian Medical Solidarity
• Asheville Tool Library
• Asheville Repair Clinic
• Another Gulf is Possible
• Bulboncha Liberation Radio

Announcement

Phone Zap for Buncombe County Jail

Members of the Asheville Community Bail Fund have announced a phone zap concerning conditions in the Buncombe County Detention Facility where reports are coming out of a lack of clean water, irregular bathroom breaks and other lack of access are leading to calls for those in the jail to be released or transferred to a facility with more humane conditions.

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Featured Track:

• I Wanna Know If It’s Good To You by Funkadellic from Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow

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Oakland Homeless Union Transcription

Freeway: My name is Freeway. I go by they/them, and I’m with Wood Street Commons, as well as the newly formed Oakland Homeless Union.

TFSR: Thanks a lot for taking the time to chat. I appreciate it.

F: Thank you for having me.

TFSR: You said the second group is the Oakland Homeless Union? I want to ask about that, then.

F: We’re a newly formed organization. We are a group of either unhoused or formally unhoused, like newly housed individuals that are organizing to fight back. The city and the state have issued a lot of policies that are really not in our favor, so we’re trying to have our voices heard.

TFSR: Cool. The name would denote to me that it’s folks that are currently in some precarious housing situation, whether living in vehicles or living in tents or maybe in shelters or on peoples’ couches. How do you define homelessness?

F: Basically, anybody that is housing insecure. That could be couch surfing, that could be, like you mentioned, in a shelter, in a tent, on the street, in a car. Even those who are newly housed or that are housed, but housing insecure, we’re trying to align with some of the tenants’ unions out here as well because what people don’t realize oftentimes is that even though you own a house, that doesn’t mean anything, we’re all one check away, as most of us that have been unhoused for some time know. It doesn’t take very much, and especially in California, the rent is so high and the property value is so high out here, it’s very difficult to find affordable living situation.

TFSR: We had mentioned the Wood Street Commons. There was a physical location for that, hence the name. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that project, what it has done, and maybe what it continues to do, if it’s not in that space anymore.

F: Sure. To back up a little bit and give a little bit of history lesson, the name Wood Street Commons comes from our first central location. We were living at 1707 Wood Street, and over the span of about a decade, the city ushered a lot of people down to Wood Street. In fact, many of us were told specifically by law enforcement, by other city officials, if you go down to Wood Street, you won’t be messed with. A lot of us did and then over that span of time, we organically formed this community and we filled in the gaps where the city wasn’t serving people. We had a community kitchen, we had a free store, we had LifeLong Medical that would come and do medical visits right there on site. Donations were dropped off there. People knew that it didn’t matter when they showed up, where they came from, how much they had, how much they didn’t have, if they showed up at Wood Street, they would have their needs met. They would be fed, they’d have a safe place to be.

In about June of 2022 the city started the first tier of evictions. By the time they came to evict us, we had expanded to about three city blocks long, and approximately a little over 300 people were living there. When they started the evictions at the north end of our community in about June 2022 we were in and out of court for a while. We reached out and had volunteers come down and do eviction defense with us and we fought a good fight but eventually it came to an end in April of 2023. When that happened, many of us were forced either to relocate on the streets, or a good portion of us actually were forced into the tiny sheds, or what they call here the community cabins. We like to call them the tiny tombs. The conditions were deplorable, so much so that the architect of them actually reached out to us and was like, “I’ve made a serious mistake. What can I do to make this better?” We’ll get to that in a minute. But basically, we were watching these so-called service providers rake in millions off the backs of services that were supposed to be provided to us that weren’t being provided. We didn’t have toilet paper, we didn’t have drinking water. There were ADA violations constantly. You name it. There was abuse of from the staff. I was physically assaulted by a staff member more than once. The worst conditions, and we couldn’t get the city to take it seriously. It didn’t matter how much we went to City Council, we raised these concerns, we talked about it on news shows. It didn’t matter.

Instead of sitting around and waiting for the city to do something, we decided to get together and get our 501(c)(3) and continue what we had been doing at Wood Street, which is feeding people, clothing people, informing people of their rights, and organizing our community. We’ve kept on with that since. As I mentioned we now have a 501(c)(3) and our main two focuses are the outreach team, which I have a lot to do with, and also our vision for the self-sustaining community that we’re in talks with. We’re in negotiations with the city right now of getting a plot of land for that, and it’s an expansion of what we already had at Wood Street. It’s self-run by the people that live there, self-governed, and it has everything you could possibly imagine. There’s vocational opportunities, there’s educational opportunities. We have a harm reduction clinic. There are living situations for families with kids, there’s housing for people who are single, or for couples. A portion of it is for RV dwellers. Very comprehensive, very service-rich. And the best thing about it is that every person that lives there, when they come there we take the time to figure out what their niche is, where their strengths are, how they can contribute to the community. Each person that comes in finds their place, finds their role, and then they pass along that knowledge to the next people that come in. It’s like this each-one-teach-one mentality, and in doing so it creates job opportunities. It creates living opportunities, people learn life skills in doing this, and it also offers us the opportunity to maintain this community with less of a worry about overhead and things like that. We’re very excited about it. We’ve been working on it for a while now with the architect, Mike Pyatok, who is actually the architect of the tiny sheds that I mentioned before. This is his way of reaching out to us and making things that the city messed up right.

TFSR: Keeping on the Wood Street Commons project, the name of it is pretty interesting, and it seems to really fulfill… the commons were this part of communities that were protected by common law in what is now the UK in England, at least, where everyone would go collect what they needed, share resources, share fields, have their animals grazing or whatever. It was a commonly held and protected community resource that was privatized through the enclosure movement which displaced communities, displaced individuals, and pushed people into factory jobs, or criminalized them and pushed them out of the country. I think that got them sent on ships to the US for the colonies, or to Australia, or to Canada or whatever. That name is really interesting. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about when y’all were coming up with that name, what you were thinking about.

F: I’m going to be honest, I was not there for the naming part, but it does resonate with me that the meaning of Commons and, like you were talking about, how it was supposed to mean something that was protected and served the community and was shared within the community and then ultimately was privatized. That’s pretty much exactly what happened with 1707. We had a safe space that we were told by the powers that be that we could be there and nobody would mess with us. And ultimately, what ended up happening is they displaced over 300 people, and very violently so. It’s a very sad fact, but in the time since we’ve been evicted from 1707 Wood Street, we’ve actually buried more of our community members than we’ve seen housed. That’s a trend that continues to show up, and it’s showing up even more now with Governor Newsom’s Executive Order and with Grants Pass being issued. We’re really seeing the negative effects of the privatization of land.

TFSR: Could you talk a bit about that executive order and we can skip around and move over to that question about what the Supreme Court said and how it’s been enacted by Democratic Governor Newsom?

F: Democratic, that’s a scary idea. Let me start with Grants Pass. Grants Pass was ruled on in I believe June, if I’m not mistaken, and what Grants Pass decision meant for us is that now, whereas before we had certain protections, cities had to offer a certain amount of services when they conducted sweeps, as they’re so inappropriately called, and that was in place because of Martin v. Boise, which was a court case that said, if a city is going to evict someone that’s unhoused, they have to offer adequate shelter. When Grants Pass got ruled on by the Trump-appointed Supreme Court that overturned Martin v. Boise, so all of a sudden you see this uptick in intensity and in frequency of these sweeps. Then very shortly after that, Governor Newsom puts out his executive order, which stated not only that he would allow sweeps to continue and to increase, he was actually ordering cities to sweep all homeless encampments. When that happened, all of a sudden, you saw a very drastic change, pretty much overnight. Now you’re seeing policies in places in all over California where it’s a misdemeanor to be unhoused. They’re using terms like “camping paraphernalia” and finding people and arresting them.

You can spend up to a month in jail for being unhoused. And if you have priors and you get arrested, it could be up to a $10,000 bail. The thing is: what happens when those people get arrested, when they come out of jail? Are they healthy? Are they whole? Are they housed? And the answer is no, nothing positive comes from this. And nobody is seeing an uptick in services being offered. You are not seeing an uptick in people being housed, just in the criminalization of the unhoused. And also a criminalization of the volunteers that are helping. The advocates that are showing up to sweeps and putting their freedom, their safety on the line because you have places like Oakland where we have a Safe Work Zone ordinance, so now all they have to do is show up with 30 cops and a couple of DPW workers and they say, “Oh, this is a Safe Work Zone now.” Well, if that Safe Work Zone is your home, is your tent with all your belongings in it, once they put up that yellow tape or that fence or whatever, you can’t go in there. You can’t grab any of your belongings. I’ve heard of people’s medicine being thrown out. Their wheelchairs being thrown out, the remains of their dead loved ones. I really struggle to say that out loud. And the people that are showing up to advocate for them are being arrested. People who are showing up to document this such as journalists are being arrested. And that’s really scary.

TFSR: That’s really traumatic. The state is dealing with people not having secure shelter or housing by criminalizing it and destabilizing people, breaking up communities further, taking away people’s means towards survival, and then, if they get arrested, redepositing them on the street. It’s not offering a solution. It’s not saying, “Here’s a place to go.” It’s saying, “Stop existing,” I guess.

F: Let’s not get it twisted. The cities that are doing this, the entities that are at the hands of this aren’t really looking for a solution. If they were, they would have brought the unhoused community and those who were most directly impacted by these policies to the table a long time ago. They would have offered sanitation or porta-potties a long time ago. Instead, it’s much easier for them to create this situation where there is a ton of trash on the street because they won’t come and collect it. There is fecal matter and urine in the street because they won’t offer bathrooms. It’s easier to then demonize the faction of people that they’re trying to have a negative view of. And then you can justify putting somebody in jail. You can justify 5150ing somebody-

TFSR: …which, for folks out of California, can you describe…

F: That’s involuntary commitment. They put you on a 72-hour hold. And that’s another tactic that we’re seeing a lot more of. People who are in a traumatizing situation, who are watching all of their belongings be crushed up in a garbage truck, who are surrounded by 30-some-odd cops with guns and billy clubs, and they’re threatening to arrest them, and they’re sitting there and antagonizing them. Of course you’re going to have an emotional reaction. Of course you’re going to be upset and be angry. They’re doing these things and then antagonizing people who are already in a vulnerable situation, and then when they react in an emotional way, then they’re 5150ing them, involuntarily committing them, also trying to do these psych evaluations on site as all this is happening, which makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody’s going to be in a rational state of mind when they’re losing everything they own. It’s really just more cruelty for the sake of creating an enemy.

TFSR: And when people do find short-term housing that’s available, like those cabins that you were talking about. One of the elements of this, obviously, I’m sure that there’s a lot of just…cruelty approach that is about getting people out of sight, or punishing people for being destabilized, or going through a hard time, or having a different reality, around mental health or addiction, or whatever that happens to be, access to resources or language barriers, what have you. But can you talk a little bit about what short-term solutions are being offered? If they build these small cabins, are they outside of city centers, away from the eyes of tourists and business people, and also very far away from resource access? Or how does that work? I know there’s a pretty robust transit system for the Bay Area, compared to a lot of other places around the country.

F: There is, and it should be noted, I don’t think it’s possible for them to have found a more out of the way, more isolated area to put these cabins. They literally picked the only sections of the city where there isn’t really a bus line nearby, or it is difficult to really get to any services. I know from experience with our time in the cabins…we’ve actually seen the grant proposal that was written for the money to open these cabins, $8.3 million was awarded to open these cabins. Amongst the services, there were supposed to be housing navigation, job readiness, help with getting your documents so you can be housed, mental health services, a computer lab. You name it. Literally none of the services, none of the programs that were in that grant proposal ever came to fruition, at least not while I was there, and to my understanding, they’re still not implemented.

However, the director of this program, I should say he was the director. He’s since been fired, and I believe, is actually on the run from being investigated. But he was notorious for bragging about spending 14 days in Belize. I’ve got a video of him coming back from vacation, like boasting about being 14 days in Belize. He would always show up to the cabins driving one of two luxury vehicles he owned, one of them being a Maserati. You see the pattern here. We can’t have toilet paper, but you can drive a Maserati. There’s a problem there, and that’s par for the course. Many of the people that exist in this homeless industrial complex have salaries that would house everybody in Oakland. If we took the money that we were spending on the sweeps and paying for these individuals to conduct these sweeps, we could absolutely house every single unhoused person in Oakland. And now I’m not talking about in a tiny tomb. I’m talking about actual housing.

TFSR: You mentioned the everyone being a paycheck away from this housing destabilization. And that makes a lot of sense, and it’s really cool to hear about the homeless union. Every everyone, obviously, who becomes homeless has a personal story of what brought them to where they are today, but the shared spaces of those stories is what could be called a social story. It’s definitely individualized, but also it paints a bigger picture when you can pick and pull elements of those and see where they overlap. Can you talk about houselessness as a social condition, about how formally housed folks become houseless, and some of the popular misconceptions around that, like around questions of safety for the individuals who are houseless, or the communities that they’re in, or addiction, agency, health, etc.?

F: For starters, I think it’s really important for anybody who’s listening to this, who’s not from California, to understand that the rent out here is too damn high. Period. There’s no real other way to say it than that it costs a fortune to live out here. I was actually in a conference sometime last year, and they were showing on a bar graph how much it cost to pay for rent in Oakland, the average rent, and the average income for an adult who’s not disabled, and actually the cost of rent was about the same height-it was about double the height on the bar chart. I forget the exact like numbers there, but that shows you in a picture how high it is out here. Everything is more expensive. It’s not just the rent. When you have a place like this, where the rent is too high, the cost of living is too high, and people are not making enough, obviously, that’s going to contribute to the situation.

On top of that, this is what I was talking about before, the homeless industrial complex. Once you have people who are becoming unhoused, these service providers are making millions off of keeping us in the cycle of getting housed, not actually housing us, just in the cycle of providing “services,” “outreach.” I’ll put it to you this way. The organization that is contracted by the city to do outreach for encampments that are about to be closed. I’m not going to say their name, but their outreach is they show up either the day before the sweep or the morning of, they approach people with a stale bag of chips at most. They might have like a couple other food items. For the most part, it’s usually like a bag of chips. And they’ll say, “Do you want to take shelter?” They won’t explain what that shelter is. If you have ADA issue, you have a disability and you need reasonable accomodations, they won’t work with you. It’s yes or no: “do you want shelter?” No details about what that is. If you say no, then you are labeled shelter-resistant. Once you’re labeled shelter-resistant, you might as well be labeled with a scarlet letter at that point because it becomes that much harder. The police, when they come to do the closures, will target you specifically. It’s an ongoing cycle.
These sweeps are so traumatic that once you’ve been through one, it knocks you off…it traumatizes you. There are a lot of misconceptions. There’s a lot of false narratives. You hear people say all the time, “Oh, well people don’t want to take shelter. They want to stay out. And use drugs or they don’t want to follow rules. That’s why they don’t want to take shelter.” First of all, there’s about one shelter bed for every four unhoused individuals in the state of California. Even if they had the swankiest, most service rich shelters, there would still not be enough of them. That’s the first issue.

Secondly, to speak to the comment about “they all want to use drugs,” that mindset, that division, that dichotomy is so dangerous, and it’s something that you hear on both sides. Even in the unhoused community, people would say, “Oh, I’m not your usual homeless person. I don’t do drugs.” That is such a dangerous mindset to have. There are some people out here that use, they use to self-medicate, and their life is as valuable as the person next to them that doesn’t use. And allowing that division, that dichotomy to exist and not to check it is really dangerous.
The words that people use in relation to how they speak about people who are unhoused…I was in a city council meeting not long ago, and we were actually discussing the closure of two encampments that are in Berkeley. They’re the only two in Berkeley. They were trying to push the closure through. And I kept people saying “Oh, these are the two most dangerous encampments in Berkeley.” Well, they’re the only two. And they would use words like ‘eradicate’ and calling people ‘dangerous’. And it really upset me that that was allowed to go on. You don’t eradicate human beings. And I can honestly tell you, in my entire time being unhoused, I have scarcely felt truly in danger ever, anywhere I’ve been on my streets. My friend that does advocacy, she’s actually a housed individual, but she always tells people when they ask her “Oh, you don’t feel dangerous walking around by yourself?” She said “No,” because when you have people’s backs and you actually listen to them and you befriend them, they have your back too.

It’s this idea that people are dangerous because they live outside is actually in and itself dangerous. And also that there’s this misconception that danger is being confused for discomfort. You’ve got all these people that are living now across from 1707 that blow up the complaint lines out here with 311, and dozens a day of “this guy set up a camp here” and exaggerated, ridiculous, very untrue recollections of what’s actually going down in front of their house. What I’ve realized from that is that these people are uncomfortable. They’re not comfortable sitting in their house and seeing somebody else unhoused. And they shouldn’t be. It’s very sad state of affairs that we live in one of the richest states in the United States, and people are suffering like they are. Yes, you should be uncomfortable, but that’s not the same thing as not being safe, and that distinction needs to be made.

TFSR: I think also to the point of “everyone’s using drugs. Drugs made people unsafe,” I’m sure some people may be self-medicating, some people may be unable to control an addiction. That’s also the case with lots of housed people. They happen to have the resources and they’re doing it behind walls, or they’re paying to do it in a public space, like a bar, and you don’t have a complaint. I live in a town that up until the recent floods has been well-known for its number of breweries and its tourist industry, and people come into town and stumble down the street all the time. It’s neighborhoods that are known for, at this point, having a ton of bars and a ton of breweries and people wandering down the street drunk, but the complaints don’t come out about those folks because they’re getting into an Uber and going to an Airbnb somewhere. And that double awareness of “it’s okay for these people to be self-medicating or be intoxicated and enjoying the substances, versus these other people because it makes you embarrassed or uncomfortable,” it’s a big hurdle for people to get over.

F: It is, and also, if you’re going to talk about the contrast and the comparisons, how many people are on some medication, some antidepressant, some Ritalin, or whatever, and they’re dependent on that? I’m not comparing opiates necessarily to Ritalin, but I’m saying a chemical dependency is a chemical dependency, whichever way you cut it. And there’s lots of things that people who are housed – and it’s not exclusive to chemical use – people talk about hoarding all the time. The architect we were speaking about earlier made an excellent point one day when we were talking. Somebody said, “Well, how are you going to control the hoarding?” And he said, “Hoarding is really not the issue. The issue is people don’t have a place to put it all. People in houses hoard too. That’s why you have attics and basements.” That was the first time I really understood he’s absolutely right. And that’s true in so many other ways too. People who are unhoused, are simply exposed.

TFSR: You’ve already gone through this. But in terms of infrastructure that does exist, or that people have the option sometimes to be able to access the tiny house or tiny tomb set up that Oakland has been providing…can you talk about some of the barriers that people who are able to get access to a program that would get them transitional housing, or public housing, or vouchers? Let’s say somebody, somebody is on the street and they want to get out of the situation. I know it’s going to be a lot of different things that are going to be figuring into it, but assuming that they don’t have real access to generational wealth, family that can help stabilize them, or friends that they can sleep on couches, how hard is it to get into transitional housing? Is it dependent on what sort of criminal history (that might be related to homelessness )that you have?

F: Surprisingly enough, and this is from the mouth of the person in charge of homelessness issues in Oakland, according to the report she was supposed to give, in lieu of having that report, she gave a few excuses, and in that conversation, she did say that they really don’t do background checks oftentimes. It’s actually pretty uncommon. That’s really not so much the issue, the issues that keep people from being put into transitional housing, more often than not, are the lack of beds. That’s overwhelmingly the issue. Past that, a lot of them are inaccessible. There’s a lot of people out here on the streets that are disabled, or they have some disability in one way or another, and these shelters don’t really cater to that, and besides that, they don’t really make it accessible for you, truthfully. For example, about a week ago, there was another major closure of another community, and two of the individuals had been told about this. There were two openings at one of the cabin communities. They said, “Absolutely, we’ll take it.” They got in the van, went with them to do the intake. They got there and there was no openings, and they said, “Okay, well, I guess we’ll try again later.” Turned around and came back. And by time they came back, everything was destroyed. What do you do at that point? That’s disheartening. It takes your faith in the people that are supposed to be helping you and smashes it. And things like that happen all the time. Girls are trafficked out of some of these places. People are abused in every which way you can think of. That’s really where the barrier lies, is in the lack of the lack of quality.

TFSR: I like to try to end conversations towards where do we go from here? What are some helpful things? Especially when people who are most affected have agency in that decision making. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what the union’s doing. The union that you were talking about, that would be working with some of the tenants unions also because that’s such a divide that doesn’t need to be there between those two organizing frameworks. How it engages, how how meetings happen, and tenants unions that you’re also working with?

F: I need to clarify. When I mentioned the tenants’ unions earlier, that was more in reference to something that we would like to see happen. That’s not currently something that’s happening at this point. The homeless union, the local that I’m a part of is still very, very new. We’ve just started, and very shortly after we started, our friends in Berkeley that are one city away, started up theirs too. We’re growing together. It’s still very new. Check back with me in about six months, and I’ll be able to give you a better answer than that.

TFSR: Cool. Are there any models of groups that you all are basing it off of? I remember back 20-30 years ago in Ontario, there was this really interesting leftist working class organizing group called OCAP, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and that’s just like one group. But I wonder if you could talk about what inspirations you have, or what steps you’re hoping to take.

F: I personally have a lot of positive influences. Some of my mentors are in other organizations that do similar types of organizing. Just to name a couple, the Love and Justice in the Streets is another grassroots organization here. And Boots is one of my all time sheroes, the League of Revolutionaries partner with us. They’ve done some organizing with us. Homefulness, POOR Magazine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Tiny and them, but they’re also really close to us. We are extended family. And the Poor People’s Campaign, just to name a few. The people that are in these organizations, like Miss Kimberly King, Nell Myhand, all of these really strong women have somehow found their way into my life, and I’ve been able to learn a lot from them, and I’m still learning. Also the other homeless unions, like the Sacramento Homeless Union. Crystal Sanchez is an amazing superhero woman. I don’t know how she does everything she does, but there’s definitely quite a large pot to draw strength and inspiration from, and they’ve all been really, really influential. [Freeway later added a shoutout to Punks with Lunch as a solid crew]

TFSR: Cool, is there anything that I didn’t ask about, that maybe you wanted to touch on, or that occurs to you now?

F: If I don’t mention the bike ride, John’s going to strangle me. One of the things that we do every year is we have this annual bike ride. And we ride from Oakland to Sacramento. There’s a little bit of history there. But to save time, I’ll fast forward. This is our third annual one, and we are leaving out Friday, and the goal is to ride our bikes to Sacramento, and we should get there by Sunday evening. Once we get there Monday morning, we have a huge rally planned at the Capitol. We also got a few meetings with different representatives lined up, and we’re gonna bend their ear and discuss with them why the policies that are in place are not working, and what we would like to see them do differently, and make some noise on the capital steps.

TFSR: It’s really important for people that are in the listening audience to recognize that, as I understand, Newsom is coordinating to work towards a presidential bid and moved from being mayor of San Francisco under some sketchy circumstances to governor. If they’re going to be voting for a federal policy, the thing that they want is a federal policy where it’s obviously putting profits of property owners, which is a minority of the general population, over the well-being of communities and whole swaths of the population that any of us who’s listening to this and paying attention could become a part of. It’s not the future that I want. It’s not something that Democrats or whoever should be proud of.

F: Right. And that’s the scary thing, all the people that we’re talking about, Governor Newsom, Mayor Sheng Thao of Oakland, London Breed in San Francisco, all of these people are supposed to be the Democrats. They’re supposed to be the “progressive” ones, and they’re pushing as hard for the erasure of an entire population of people. That terrifies me. If that’s what the Democrats are doing, what the hell is in store with the Republicans? Or the more right wing. That’s an absolutely terrifying thought.

TFSR: Freeway, thank you for having this conversation. I really appreciate it, and good luck with the bike ride. If you want to send any organizational links or if any other groups occur to you, or places where people can keep up with perspectives of people that are experiencing houselessness or houseless destabilization, who are talking about these issues, I’d be happy to populate the show notes with that stuff.

F: Certainly, I’ll also send you more info

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Janet from ROAR Transcription

Janet: I’m Janet, and I use she/her pronouns. I live and work in Madison County in western North Carolina. I live about an hour from Asheville, honestly, but the place where my classroom and clinic is is about 30 minutes from Asheville, for people who are considering the geography here. I’m from the foothills of this area, and my mom’s family are from Spruce Pine, and my dad’s family are from the foothill. So my whole family, on both sides, are within the flood zone. I am personally connected as well as being living here now. I have lived in Madison County, I bought land with some friends about 20 years ago, and have lived here full time since 2008. The reason I here to talk to you is that I organize with Rural Organizing and Resilience, and we are working on regional, local disaster relief in the face of hurricane Helene.

TFSR: Thanks a lot for taking the time to be here for this. You mentioned ROAR. Could you talk a little bit about the history of ROAR and other formations you want to mention that you work with in Madison County?

J: Yes. As far as the history of ROAR goes, some of the relevant information that I think is actually pretty important to the level to which we’ve been able to be quickly responding to the current situation is that a few of us founded ROAR back in winter of 2016-2017. So post-election, and the white supremacist vibes were ramping up really hard that year. It was really intense. There was a lot of open white supremacist organizing happening in the mountains, and so we actually formed ROAR originally as more focused on anti-racist action and trying to create systems of safety here in the county and in western North Carolina in the mountains. That was the original point. But it’s been one disaster after another following that year, and we still have an anti-racist focus but we shifted a lot of our work into doing more mutual aid work especially once 2020 hit and the pandemic got rolling and a lot of people were out of work out here, very little safety net for people. We set up a distribution center then and did food deliveries, water deliveries, resource deliveries, medication deliveries that whole year almost. And some of the people delivering for us now delivered back then as well. That was big and also helped us understand how to run a distribution site from moving through that.

We also have a firewood distribution set up. One of the main needs of this area, a lot of people use wood heat, which is more reliable sometimes, but you need to be able-bodied to be able to collect firewood, unless you’re buying firewood. We have a group of folks who collect firewood, process it, and deliver it, and that’s been a pretty solid distribution activity and resource that we’ve been supplying this county with for a few years now. We’ve been able to get some grants to buy equipment and stuff, which are coming in really handy now. Because now we’re able to actually collect firewood that’s down by the road. And we’re collecting firewood for this winter which is probably going to be a hard one for a lot of people around here. I guess I should also say that we are connected to Holler Harm Reduction, and that’s been a really important resource. They help serve the community who need safe use supplies around here and a lot of good contacts out in the county, but also they have a space, and they’re a nonprofit. And really I don’t know where we would be this week if it hadn’t been for the support of Holler Harm Reduction. I do want to say that as well, they’ve been indispensable. And we’re also connected to the Asheville Tool Library. They’ve been so helpful. I’ll stop here because I know we need to get more into the details in a bit, but these years of already organizing and already having distribution networks has been so helpful for responding quickly to this situation.

TFSR: And I’d like to hear more shout outs at the end too. Just to go off script for a second with the question… So ROAR and, in Buncombe County, the Blue Ridge ABC chapter, and then also in wider western North Carolina, and then expanded out from there, Appalachian Medical Solidarity, which I think which I think was started at the same time the time. These are a few formations that developed out of people with skills reacting to the general world that was connected to Trump’s election and that timeframe, right?

The fact that they’ve continued is really awesome. While you can point to a political critique that’s present in groups like this that have been around for this period of time, I wonder if you can speak about the wider participation from community members who don’t consider themselves radical, or radical leftists or whatever. Did you put down a flag and say, “This is our ideology, come to us”? Or you made it about the activity, but also kept it within a certain zone of “we’re not going to work with Nazis.”

J: That’s a good question. One thing that’s true in these rural Appalachian communities is people feel very judged by outsiders, and they see people who haven’t lived here for a very long time as outsiders. Some of us are from nearby, but most of us are not. There’s a couple people from right here, but most of us are not. We knew going into this that we had to be cautious not to use language that would make people feel shamed or judged, while at the same time being like we were anti-racist. And honestly, in the beginning, we were called Rural Organizing Against Racism, and using that name alone meant people thought [we] hated them and didn’t want to talk to them. So the shift to Rural Organizing And Resilience, while still doing a lot of anti-racist work, has been really helpful because it’s allowed us to emphasize shared values, like community care. People here are very self-sufficient. There’s a big emphasis on self-sufficiency. There’s also emphasis on helping your neighbors and caring for each other.

Mutual aid is part of the culture here because this is a place where people have been very poor and definitely neglected. These are not people who do not have access to most of the kinds of services or any safety net as it exists in the world, which there’s not a lot of that anyway at this point. There’s a pride in caring for self here and for caring for community, and there’s an ethic for that. And generally western North Carolina is a little funny. It’s not as Trump-y as a lot of the state, it’s not as hostile feeling as a lot of places where I’m from, the foothills. And even between those two places, it’s pretty different. We still try to have anti-racist messaging in our front and center, but we don’t talk about politics. We definitely don’t talk about electoral politics. We use some talking points that anarchists would recognize, but we don’t actually use the A-word openly out in the world, and everyone in our group is not an anarchist. And there’s all kinds of folks, I’m not going to name all the affiliations. There’s many kinds of people that are part of the group, and what we try to do is emphasize the shared values of community care and autonomy and self-sufficiency, which is really loud out here. That is the culture of this place. Now, unfortunately, those sentiments can be sidelined and pushed into more divisive places by the people who are interested in that, if you’re not careful. We try to feed and nourish those sentiments that are about us taking care of each other.

TFSR: And a wider sense of definition of each other that doesn’t play into the tropes of “Well, these are outsiders. They’re people are from south of the border, or whatever. They’re from a city.”

J: But that being said, a lot of the volunteers who’ve been coming to drive supplies out to other places are locals, all kinds of people. There’s obviously people who are tapping into our distribution network that might normally be doing more of a church-type charity, but are coming and helping us and spreading stuff around. I have seen a lot more community participation this time than in the past.

TFSR: Cool, it seems to have had such a huge impact on the whole region that for people not to pull together would be ridiculous.

J: Right. Yes, we have to make it through the next phases.

TFSR: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience of the storm in the immediate grassroots response with those existing infrastructure and relationships that folks already had that create the response to need and shape your response.

J: I’m so interested in talking about this because I’ve learned a lot from this about what the holes are in our networks and capacity to respond. What I didn’t say at the beginning of this is that I live at the top of a mountain off the grid. I have Starlink. We didn’t have much wind event. We didn’t have flooding, and so we were less impacted than many people. So on Thursday night all of our little ROAR close group checks in on our Signal threads and check in on everybody.

We talk about our plan for the next day and we plan to talk later. Then in the morning we check in again, wind is picking up, everyone checks in, and then we go to bed. That day everyone’s a little stressed [call breaking up] But the next day, there’s radio silence. We could get out. We were getting information from the outside world because we had because we had service and hadn’t lost power because we’re on solar. And our Starlink can be a little spotty because it’s a pretty deep holler up there, but it’s still better than nothing and it’s not tied to the electrical grid.

So we didn’t know how anyone was doing. None of us could communicate with each other. None of us knew how each other were doing for at least a day, in some cases, two days. That Saturday we took care of stuff at the house. The next day, we tried to get into downtown Marshall – it was closed off at that point – and to assess the flooding and take some pictures, to send people and to try to get some messages, see who we could get ahold of. Fortunately a lot of the damage out here was trees down in the roads, and there are so many people who are chainsaw competent, and so the citizens of Madison County cleared the roads up. And I know that from what I heard, it was easier to get around here than it was Asheville for several days because of people not only removing the trees, but collecting firewood from it. Because that’s how it is. This is a subsistence-type lifestyle that so many people are used to here, where they collect the resource as it falls. It’s a literal windfall. The tree is there. You collect the wood. We didn’t even have to use a chainsaw, except to get out of our driveway, get to town, we’re still the only people we can hear from. At a certain point, people start leaving their abodes and going to check on each other physically in cars. The topography of this place is important to remember because we’re so separate from each other, even when we’re close because it’s the mountains and valleys create a topography that’s difficult to navigate here. And I should say that ROAR, or a lot of us have the Baofeng radios, and they did not work in this situation. They did not help.

TFSR: I’ve heard Margaret Killjoy talk about this on other podcasts, about the amount of moisture in the air, messing with the radio waves/the topography or because, I’m sure y’all practice, but Baofengs are really complicated. I’m not practiced with them and I have two and I could definitely.. but..

J: I don’t you know. It’s a good question. I had assumed it was mostly topography, but I’m not sure. We have friends at Bvlbancha Liberation Radio radio down in New Orleans, and they talked about how they’re able to set up [the mobile Starlinks there and get around and get everybody’s service. But here, that’s not an option because it really has to have almost visual, to be in sight. So this not being able to communicate with people was alarming. We all checked on each other and our neighbors for a couple days and but still…this was true outside of the larger region too. It was really interesting to be at this top of the mountain, off grid, but be the only person with communication capacity. We saw right away that we needed to start giving updates to the outside world. My partner and I, Dave. We were fielding health and safety checks from strangers being like, “Please, can you go see someone on this road?” People that we do know who wanted us to check on everyone they knew around here. It was like being inundated with questions. And it made me see how reliant we are on constant contact with people.

By Monday here in Madison County, we had had a meeting scheduled for that following Wednesday that was a regular meeting. And we were like, “All right, we got to move it up.” We met on Monday with ROAR, and then any affiliate friends and people who were interested in working on the response effort. By Tuesday, we had a hub set up. And we were receiving donations, putting out communications, dividing up the jobs. Of course, mutual aid Disaster Relief has a lot of different hubs around and there are people who are organizing communication between the hubs. Their existing network and our existing connections and capacity for working together and already having had experience with this thing has been really helpful. Also, we have people with medic trainings. We have people who are comfortable using ATVs because we were having to do health and safety checks on ATVs, get medications delivered to people off road in certain parts of Yancey County, specifically.

Madison was much less hard hit. It was not hit as hard at all as Yancy. Yancey got 30 inches of rain in one day or something. Those immediate needs, we were able to get to pretty quickly because we already had the relationships, and we already had methods of communication and getting things done, and people willing to do that work, obviously. But I can’t really overemphasize how important it is to already be working on community care and networks of distribution and support before something hits the fan.

TFSR: Yeah, it’s good to have ideas of what is possible or what is likely to happen, so that you’re prepared for it. But even having the ability to have those conversations in the run-up to a situation like that means that if the situation’s different, at least you can pivot to whatever that need is with those people that are in communication still, and then you can all reach out to your connections that makes sense in that context. I think the water is still in the process of being tested, but I’ve been hearing different things about the reality of the possible chemical spill from the PVC pipe manufacturing Woodfin on Riverside. For listeners that don’t know that’s up river of Woodfin in Madison County. It’s north of, but downriver of, Asheville because of the way river flows on the French Broad, specifically, or other sources of chemicals that would enter into the water that’s now the mud, that’s now the dust that’s blowing around, that’s affecting residents and cleanup efforts.

J: I can speak to that a bit. As you mentioned, there’s still a lot of unknowns, and there’s a good bit of conspiracy talk around this. It’s hard to get answers around the water testing and the soil testing. But [from] some people who have been working with it more and seem somewhat knowledgeable of it, it’s clear that the dirt, the sludge on the island, at least in downtown Marshall (which is what I’m more used to people working with) is gross. It smells bad. There’s a rainbow color in it. You’ll see some rainbows in certain areas, it looks like a fuel. That plastics manufacturer makes PVC and stuff. They had vats of nastiness. And that place was destroyed. We can only presume that they went into the water.

On top of that – and I think this gets emphasized less – but this river arts district was flooded full of chemicals and solvents because artists use chemicals and solvents often. We got woodworking stuff. I am not trying to make it equal to the manufacturing of a plastics place. But it all adds up. And even in lesser floods here on the French Broad River, you’ll see giant house-size propane tanks floating by, or little RVs, little campers float by. The place is going to be full of chemicals, even if there hadn’t been the one bigger dump that was the plastics manufacturer. There has been some report of mild chemical burns from people who touched the sludge, and that was before people were using the PPE. Now, people are pretty solid with the PPE, but for a while it wasn’t like that, and I know that before they started wetting down the dirt in downtown Marshall inhaling it was not great. People who inhaled it are having some lung issues because it was really dusty and dry and that stuff is in the air.

I know there’s been a lot of efforts to promote the French Broad as a clean river in the past 10 years. And honestly, having lived around here for a long time, I’m always shocked when I see people tubing. But I always thought of it as a little gross because there was a bleachery on it in Swannanoa, all these things. But yes, there is a chemical dump that happened in there. It’s also true that the water level was really high. It was diluted a good bit and moved onto the Gulf, which also is terrible. But I don’t want to downplay that there’s chemicals in there, but there’s a lot of emphasis on one spot when I think that, gosh, who knows how many chemicals from other areas that flooded were in that water, and they’re definitely in that dirt, and it will take a while to figure that out, to see what the residual effects of that are. That is frightening, and I honestly worry more about all of the other animals of the riparian system as well. What about all of the hellbenders and the other salamanders and the fish, special plants that live along the river. I do have that concern around the toxicity of the flood and the toxic spill within the flood, and also it’s hard to hold it all at one time. It’s hard to think of all of these things and to hold space for that. I also fear that we could have a pretty big outbreak of a psychogenic illness where people are worried that you produce the symptoms you think you might have.

So I try to be careful when I talk about it as well. But I do think the water was full of some nastiness and the dirt around the flood zone is full of nastiness as well. Now, I don’t think it’s actually going to be condemned. There were definitely memes or text alerts going around about how downtown Marshall was gonna be condemned. I don’t think that’s happening, but probably there will be some longer term damage to the environment, maybe more than to the humans walking around there.

TFSR: So no Centralia moment for-

J: I don’t think we’re gonna have a Centralia moment.

TFSR: The PPE that people upgraded from rubber sole boots, and like Tyvek boots, Tyvek suits. Is it VOC, volatile organic compounds ventilators, when they’re doing mucking?

J: Yes, people are doing full on respirators and Tyvek suits. Some people are doing gloves and respirators with better covering clothes, but not necessarily Tyvek. Because there’s some people doing the cleanup every day. They can get the sludge every day. We’ve had an incredible volunteer response for downtown Marshall, and there’s folks coordinating that out of Nanostead, where they help you get your PPE on, and there’s a shuttle that takes you downtown to help with the cleanup and bring you back. It’s really beautiful. All of that is really wonderful to see, and people have integrated putting on the PPE as part of the process.

TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about what the government responses look like? I’ve heard people talking in the area about “Oh, there’s a lot of soldiers around here.” There are conspiracy theories about FEMA taking people’s property and whatever.

J: Sure. I’ll do my best. The local government response, the county and the city, at least here, they’re pretty on it and seem solid. They’ve set up some pretty big distribution centers. I’ve heard that both their distribution sites and any that are more federally connected are starting to get skimpy and limit how much they let people take and it seems like they’re planning to shut down in not very long. They’re around now. I don’t see them being here long-term, and that’s also from former experience. But I don’t know anything about the state, North Carolina state, at all. I was thinking about this at the different levels, and I’m really not sure about that might be longer term. The federal response took a little while, as always. And something that some of us were talking about with ROAR was that when you have this big bureaucratic machinery, the inertia to get anything done quickly, it’s very hard for them to move quickly. Those of us that are doing more decentralized care, even the giant bureaucratic aid organizations aren’t here. Red Cross is not here because it takes a while for anything that’s like a big machine to get it moving. But when you’re decentralized and you can plan quickly and dispatch resources quickly, collect resources, liquidate them, move them around, you can move more quickly. The federal response has taken a while, but I don’t think it’s out of neglect. I don’t have a dog in the fight about blaming this on the administration or whatever. I find it annoying and distracting that that is happening, but it’s never surprising to me when a giant bureaucracy takes a minute to do something.

Now, yes, it almost feels like a military occupation on the island, the army is here. The National Guard, that’s a part of the state branch because there’s different versions of the National Guard. The National Guard was in Yancey County and Mitchell County. That response depends a lot upon the specific personnel involved. These seem to be very, very young people who don’t know how to do many things or have trouble organizing. And from what people I know who went there said, including my family, you had to boss them around and explain to them how to do things, be like, “You need to do this now and then go do this, and then set this up,” and then they would do it. But that was the chain of command – locals coming in and being like, “Excuse me, I’m going to tell you how to run this line.” But usually this is such a weird thing to say, but honestly, it was like this in New Orleans because I was also there before and after Katrina, I wasn’t there for the actual storm. The National Guard can feel so incompetent that you’re almost grateful when the army shows up because they have a chain of a command and they understand how to do things and they’re at work, doing their operations. On the island, they are moving a lot of stuff around. They have a ton of equipment, and it feels more like an engineering project, and that problems are being solved there. I can’t speak to what they’re doing other places, but the things that actually require a higher level of equipment that we can’t afford…I’m grateful to see the people bringing those in and dealing with that. Like we need the backhoes and all of the dirt movers of the world right now, so they are there doing that. And that feels important to me. I don’t know how long there will be government attention to this area. That’s a big question.

TFSR: When I was imagining a lot of those military that was present, they’re probably Army Corps of Engineers, and that they would be, as you said, moving earth, clearing roads, maybe laying down gravel, restoring electrical infrastructure or removing damaged electrical infrastructure. Island is a good staging ground, especially if you’ve got access to the other side because it’s a big, flat area that’s separate from the right, and there’s a water filtration plant, an electrical generation plant, at least that was upriver of there a quarter mile or something less than that. That’s a good staging ground for them to be at.

J: It’s a good location, and it makes sense. It’s just alarming when you go there. You’re like, “Oh, sorry, I wanted to go water my plants.”

TFSR: As autumn sets in and this situation reaches into the third week since Helene, what needs do you see recovery and community responding to? And does this dovetail with the ongoing challenge of marginalization of rural working class communities and the work that ROAR has already been engaged with, for instance, the wood distribution?

J: I’m so grateful we already have the wood distribution set up. I highly encourage people to do that if you live somewhere really…giving people firewood is such a great way to build community and have people establish connections with people you might not normally connect with. We’re definitely amping up our firewood collection, and hopefully solidifying some multiple levels of response for delivery. Right now, we’re losing our space. We had someone donate a little space, but we’ve already outgrown it, and also they’re ready to get back to normal, and it’s pretty wild in their parking lot right now. We’re gonna lose this space, but we are looking for a bigger one. Because what’s clear is, as I mentioned earlier, that the more government organized donation sites and pickup sites limit how much people can have. They seem to be shutting down. And we’re expecting people to have a hard time all winter. If they make it through their emergency unemployment situation, which is a mess, if they make it through the FEMA hoops and all of that. It’s a lot of bureaucracy to navigate. These are multi-generation households out here too, and there often will be a limit per household on aid. And at least that’s how it was after Katrina. New Orleans is amazing because there were so many generations living together in some places. And they would really limit how much money they gave those people because they were thought they were lying that they live together. They would only let one or two people use each address. So I’ve seen that already, and that is also the case here. There will be one address with multiple structures on it. And because property tax is so insane out here, people can’t afford to buy a place, you put another little unit on your land-

TFSR: …or because elder or childcare being a responsibility for families.

J: For sure. Where collective care is happening in those multi-generation families, you have child care, you have elder care, all of that in one place. You’re not going to put your old folks up somewhere else, send your children off. The kinds of like kinship structures that can be really helpful for all kinds of people, including immigrant communities also are going to have a hard time getting through some of this FEMA stuff. Because same thing, many people in one household. But anyway, the resources are going to be limited that are coming from governmental structures, and so we are seeing a need to maybe have a larger warehouse space. It’s what we’re looking for, a larger space because people want to give us so many supplies. They really want to give us supplies, and that’s wonderful. And also we have such limited space, and we don’t know how long we’re going to get to be in one where we are right now. And so we have to really be picky about what we’re accepting, knowing full well that in a month, people are going to need all these diapers and everything that we don’t have room for right now. We’re hoping to get a bigger space. But I think that anybody doing this support should be keeping in mind the long-term and that who knows when people are going to be able to go back to work and have income around here. Madison County, which was hit not as bad, people have a lot of canned food put up. They have their deer meat and their freezers and stuff. If they didn’t lose it, some of them probably lost it when they lost power. But in Yancey and Mitchell people lost whole houses. They lost everything. In those spots, I don’t even know what’s going to happen. Hopefully the push to have folks that have Airbnbs to help support people by letting them stay there is going to help because there’s a lot of vacation rentals out here. Housing is also going to be a priority, and there’s other groups working on that. I’m thinking more about main maintenance of survival needs over the winter, firewood, and so in those counties that were the hardest hit – it’s housing.

TFSR: It seems like if there are folks in communities that are outside of the immediately impacted area of the storm, that collecting goods as a part of a hub if you’ve got the space to store it, and then waiting for those perennial needs like diapers or fuel or whatever else (maybe don’t store a bunch of fuel) is not a bad idea. And then someone can drive it in every once in a while, but then in the in the meantime, sending funds that are liquid and turns into goods as needed.

J: That’s been really helpful because we have been getting a lot of donations. It’s been wonderful, of supplies, but also of cash. When no one’s bringing me fire extinguishers to send home with these propane heaters and stuff like that, I can run to Lowe’s and get a bunch of fire extinguishers. It’s been really helpful to do that and to have that capacity to be flexible in the needs.

TFSR: You’ve already mentioned some things that have been helpful for you all, like extending your networks over time. I know that you were doing multilingual dinners and get-togethers generally that are socializing as well as filling the immediate need. A slightly more upscaled and more rural version of Food Not Bombs in some ways, right? There’s not a lot of houseless folks in a lot of parts of Madison County because there’s no place to be. And then the wood exchange or giveaways and deliveries of wood and medications and such. Do you have any other tips for preparation for folks of the possible or inevitable climate catastrophes and failure of infrastructure that’s accelerating around us? It seems like having these networks is already a good first step because then you’re building off of something.

J: I think establishing networks is a good idea, establishing relationships, learning to trust the people that you work with, learning to work through conflict, communicate with each other, have different opinions. All these things are really important. Learning how to speak to each other kindly as you talk about things that are stressful. Because when you’re under acute stress like we have in the past week, it’s easy to get bitchy and snap at people. If you haven’t already figured out how to tone that down, not be reactive, it’s not going to go as well. Definitely trying to do outreach and work with other groups and meet needs. We’re pretty good at fundraising, so we do a lot of fundraising for other groups, which means that we helped restore the historic Black school in Mars Hill, we gave some money towards that. We helped save a historic Black cemetery that there was a property dispute over. When you can make some cash, spread it around. That’s really helpful for a lot of groups that are less high profile. That’s what we’re doing right now too because we’ve been able to raise money rather quickly, so we’re redistributing it to the groups that are not able to do that, including undocumented folks. In fact, when I hear people talk about the government giving all the money to undocumented people, I’m like, “Are you serious? Like, no one is helping these people.” This is where we have to come in and try and get some resources to these communities.

I always say one group that we work with and help out, who are doing a really amazing distribution site is Poder Emma, which is in Emma, an interesting little rural enclave next to Asheville. They’re doing amazing work. They’re doing a similar distribution thing, but with definitely serving the Latine community. Building up relationships over time, where you share resources and you show that you’re willing to sacrifice for other, for all kinds of people, and give and donate, especially if you’re good at getting money, which some people are better than others. Even doing this interview is not for everybody. I would say doing all the network building, building trust, trying to identify your region’s specific strengths and weaknesses. Me being like, “Okay, people will get out here with chainsaws and clear the roads before we even talk about it.” I can probably get a lot of people who don’t use wood heat to collect firewood and bring it to me. These kinds of resources of the strength being wood heat, leaning into that, leaning into people’s skills with processing firewood, all those kinds of things.

What are the weaknesses here? Weaknesses are we’re all very isolated. Even when we live next to each other, it might be hard to get there. Making safety plans for keeping your community intact and checking on each other. We definitely saw some things fall through. Like I didn’t practice the radios. And also, every topography has its own issues. And the strength of this place is self-sufficiency, community care, all those kinds of things that are really entrenched in the culture here. But the weaknesses can also be not trusting outsiders sometimes. And that can be a strength because I’m hoping that keeps people from being preyed upon by disaster capitalists and real estate speculators who are already here doing the thing that they do, which is snap up land. I’m hoping that protectionist vibe is going to protect those people and help them not sell their land. But also it can sometimes mean not always sharing with outsiders, when maybe we should also be accepting other people into the community right now because we’re less hard hit than other places.

So, assessing what are the issues most likely to happen where you are. In some places that’ll be wildfires. In some places that’s going to be one hurricane after another in more of a flat zone. The ongoing stress of the extraction industries, especially fuel extraction. The fact that the whole Gulf is the sacrifice zone and understanding that pressure accelerating everything. I’ve been pretty inspired by some of our community down around Bulbancha (New Orleans), and their disaster preparedness. The folks at Another Gulf is Possible are doing a lot of awesome work, and they’re figuring out a lot of communication stuff because their communications go down regularly. The Bulbancha Liberation Radio is making these mobile Starlink units that are solar-powered, and they can drive them around and get radio and phone service to people and that is huge. If people were going to build autonomous hubs, we should have that capacity. We could have gone and set up at Ingles [a grocery store] and saved people so much stress. I definitely encourage anybody raising money or putting together resilience networks right now to invest in some communications apparatus for sure.

TFSR: As you said, situations and preparedness are going to look a lot different in different geographies, and technologies are always shifting and developing. Being prepared and learning what’s available, I guess. You’ve listed a few groups already, but are there any other groups that you want to shout out?

J: I hope I don’t leave anyone out. I mentioned National Tool Library, but I want to say they provided a service, and they’re still providing it. I think is so amazing. They set up engine repair tents, and they did that in Marshall, I think they did it Nancy, but they actually set up hubs where people will work on your chainsaw, work on your small engine repair and help you get your chainsaw ready so you can work on your land, or your generator. Because peoples’ generators often sit around for years at a time, and so they’re working on that that is an incredibly useful offering. That thing should absolutely be in your network if you’re trying to create a network of support. I mentioned Poder Emma already. Building connections between different groups is so important. I talked about Holler Harm Reduction. I want to say their name again because I have no idea where we would be this week if it wasn’t for them. Really, really indispensable support there. I’m sure that I will be after this be like, “Ah, what about those people?” Firestorm is also an awesome resource helping people figure out what’s going on on the ground. And I can check in on their page. Having updated communications, where you’re like, “This is what’s happening on the ground. Here’s what’s being offered.” Honestly, Blue Ridge Public Radio has been quite helpful, their updates are helpful. As someone who people are looking to to update the rest of the continent, which is part of my job right now. It’s been helpful for me to glean that information from other sources. And Firestorm has obviously been really useful for that.

TFSR: Well, cool. If you think of any other groups in the next few hours and you want to send me a link, that’s great. Where can people learn more about ROAR and possibly send donations?

J: We have a website ruralorganizing.wordpress.com. We’re on Instagram at @_ROAR_WNC. We also have Patreon if you want to help the work through the winter. We have Venmo and PayPal, although, gosh, sometimes those are difficult services to work with, but we’re working it out. That’s the main way you can keep up with us. I’ve been trying to do regular updates for us on social media. It’s not always fun, but I’m doing it. I’m hoping that once things have died down a little bit, we could actually start to really compile a resource for sharing with people about what’s gone down and help. I want to emphasize this now that the racist division that is being spread by right-wing pundits and mercenary politicians who are trying to use this for the election cycle is really challenging. It’s making our work harder. Our people feel less safe going out into the field to make deliveries we’re having. We’re getting sidetracked by long discussions when we need to be get on the road. It is to be expected that this is how things are going, but it’s stressful, and the folks around here are vulnerable, and they’re already having a hard time, and it’s all too easy to blame people besides yourself who don’t look like you when you’re having a hard time.

TFSR: And when Mr. Appalachia JD Vance decides to talk about JD Vance decides to talk about who belongs in Appalachia, not everyone is blue-eyed and white skinned like him and I. There’s a lot of diversity in Appalachia. I would not speak for everyone.

J: For sure. We’re going to be working a lot more on messaging around that and trying to dispel some of the falsehoods that are being spread right now.

TFSR: Janet, thank you so much for having the conversation and the work that you’re doing. And hope to get to share space with you soon.

J: Cool. Thanks, Bursts, nice to see you. Bye.

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