Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 231: See How We Run! Learning From Fireweed — With Sarah Common and Cait Hurley

Speakers: Samantha Walters, Julia Aoki, Kathy Feng, Sarah Common, Cait Hurley

[theme music]

Samantha Walters  0:07
Hello listeners, welcome to See How We Run! Conversations with arts and cultural workers. This is a special Below the Radar series hosted by…

Julia Aoki  0:17
Julia Aoki.

Kathy Feng    0:18
Kathy Feng.

Samantha Walters  0:19
And Samantha Walters. See How We Run! is a mini series looking at local arts collectives and organizations, highlighting conversations about creation, space making, accessibility and self determination within the framework of Vancouver's cityscape. These episodes are recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.

Julia Aoki  00:41
On this episode of See how We Run! we're joined by Hives for Humanity's co-directors, Sarah Common and Cait Hurley, to talk about the history of the apicultural organization, its evolution from a supportive pre-vocational training program to a community supported apiculture model and the ways they are centering the relationship to the plants and soil in the Hastings folk garden in their work. Hello, welcome back to Below the Radar. My name is Julia Aoki, and I'm your host this week. And I'm here with two very special guests, Sarah Common and Cait Hurley.

[theme music fades]

Sarah Common  01:22
Hello. 

Cait Hurley  01:23
Hi.

Julia Aoki  01:24
I thought we could start by having you introduce yourselves a little bit.

Sarah Common  01:29
I'm Sarah Common, and I am one of the co-directors of Hives for Humanity Society, which is how I come to be here today, to share some story around that role, and the 11 years now that we've been working as a, as a society. My ancestry is to Ireland, and I've been living on these lands, unceded and occupied Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, for 25 years — so most of my adult life. And I have been learning about care practice, and what it means to be on these lands and how to bring myself and my ancestry, my gifts, and my practice in, into my work here, at this small garden down the block from where we are on the 100 block of East Hastings. And, yeah, that ancestry on my dad's side is to Northern Ireland, and he, he moved here as a young child. And my mom's is also to Ireland, the South. She was born here, and her family settled five generations ago. And it's through my mom, that the practice of honeybee tending came into my life.

Julia Aoki  02:46
So it's something that you have been doing since you were a child, or— 

Sarah Common  02:50
It's not, no. It's something that I've been doing since I got involved in this garden and wanted to look for ways to connect there. So then it was a resource in, in my family that I asked, asked into the garden. Yeah.

Julia Aoki  03:05
But it was sort of an ambient presence?

Sarah Common  03:08
It wasn't, no.  There was—there was a photo of my mom as a young person. In her studies at Macdonald College, there was a photo of her tending bees that was on our family wall. That was it.

Julia Aoki  03:09
Oh wow, yeah. Cait? Oh (laughs). 

Cait Hurley  03:24
I'm Cait, and I'm co-director of Hives for Humanity. I've been organizing on the 100 block of East Hastings for the last decade, in a variety of roles, mostly street level, harm reduction, plant medicine, thinking about health, and how we do that amidst ongoing crisis. And I found my way into the garden, I think in 2015?

Sarah Common  03:54
About that, yeah. 

Cait Hurley  03:55
Yeah. I was selling weed on Columbia and Hastings, and was in this time that felt quite magical, where there was a lot of connection happening between growers and patients, and community and access. And it felt like we could build anything for a moment. And I made my way into the garden and we started collaborating, and I started meeting more people. I'd been working with Carnegie Action Project.

Julia Aoki  04:22
Just for some additional context around this conversation—so myself and my colleagues, we wanted to do a series of interviews with arts and cultural organizations. And I could see that this might seem a little bit outside of that, in that on the surface Hives for Humanity is an apicultural organization. Although from what I've seen, Hives is very much a cultural organization, because of the way that it centers community relations in its work. And, yeah, I thought maybe we could start by getting a kind of broader history of the organization from you, Sarah.

Cait Hurley  04:22
And this beautiful practice of weaving began to happen, community weaving. We've been talking about that lately. And I've been there ever since. So, I stepped onto the board of Hives for Humanity, chaired the board, began chairing the Community Engagement Committee, which since transformed the society and then moved into co-director with Sarah, which is at this point, more like co-organizer. And I live in the Downtown Eastside. I work in the Downtown Eastside. I feel very connected to my elders in the Downtown Eastside, and it's the closest thing that I've found to home at this stage of my life. My ancestry is Doukhabor Russian, from my maternal lineage, and Irish from my paternal. And I draw a lot from my Doukhabor practices into my work, I think a lot about land and utopia, and communalism and roles and responsibilities, um, displacement. All of these things serve me. 

Sarah Common  06:02
Yeah, so in, in 2008, I was working at the then Life Skills Centre, and later PHS Drug Users Resource Centre. And I was in the kitchens and in wellness groups, and bringing food into those groups through my practice and my educational background, which was around food security. So, in thinking of ways to bring food into these cultural spaces at that resource center, I started looking for places where we could grow, harvest, hands in the soil, be with the plants and bring things that we were touching into those spaces. And, through that I found that there was a garden three blocks away, that I didn't know existed before. And that was this space—117 East Hastings, the Hastings Folk Garden—and started just going there and learning: learning the soil, learning the plants, learning the systems of bringing water, the systems of opening the gate. And in 2012, asked community at the garden, folks who we were doing—we were calling it Grow Your Own Medicine—through that programming at the Life Skill Centre, asked this question of like, "well, I have a mother who tends bees. And could we bring honeybees in? Would you be interested? Is there space? What does that look like?" So we did that in June 2012. We brought honey bee—two, no, we brought one honey bee hive on like a really early morning, misty morning, before traffic, as the sun was rising in June of 2012. 

And we tended together over that summer, we'd go once a week as volunteers and tend and the hives did well. They made honey, it was delicious and fun to share. We had people stepping into the role of tending and we were starting to have questions around the community down the street, thinking like, "well, I have a rooftop. What about this other garden? You know, can we bring the honey can we bring the bees?" And so we founded as a nonprofit society in September 2012. So after that successful first season where we were really like feeling this grounded hope and the possibility of opening the gate more, having resourced the garden with this like story, this sweet honey, and the potential of the hives. So yeah, we started from this place of access, like how do we open the garden more? How do we make it something that is like better resourced so it can be open more, so people can come in and be in this space? And we can be connecting to land through food and strengthening in community together through this, like, land and food system. And, more and more over the 11 years now that question of access has become central. The question of land and the relations of land, the elements, the seasons—like how we do this work in a good way, in the context of unceded and occupied land, in the context of the Downtown Eastside and concurrent, like, worsening, ongoing crises of policy. You know, how are the—how are the honeybees relevant as a bee that is non Indigenous, and as organizers who are white organizers, and in a nonprofit system? How, how is this relevant? Is this relevant? How do we do it in a good way? What are the relationships that hold us? So this has been the arc of the 11 years. 

And there are still honeybees at that garden. They're still being asked for there. And we are finding ways to be in better relationship with those honeybees, share their gifts or our gifts. And consider how and when the nonprofit is something we can leverage to redistribute resources, and how, and when, and where we can decompose the nonprofit. Let it go.

Julia Aoki  08:15
I like that phrasing. 

Sarah Common  10:09
It's, like, very collaboratively built phrasing. Like, together and in our network of accountability artists— 

Cait Hurley  10:17
Organizers. 

Sarah Common  10:18
Organizers.

Cait Hurley  10:20
Community members.

Sarah Common  10:21
Yeah.

Cait Hurley  10:21
Elders, care workers, fire keepers, soil tenders, water holders. 

Sarah Common  10:29
Yeah.

Cait Hurley  10:30
Yeah, that language is well held. 

Julia Aoki  10:32
That is lovely. It's really interesting to me to hear your description of the early, early days, the formation of Hives. I see the continuity, I can understand the continuity in the way that you are describing it. But the way that I encountered it first—I may have encountered it through the honey itself prior to coming to know the organization. But I really got to know Hives when I was the executive director at Megaphone because there had been a number of partnerships between the two. And I sort of identified it through the lens of the social enterprise, in part because that was a phrasing that I was grappling with at Megaphone, and I know that it was a phrasing that had been either adopted, adapted or leveraged, as you say, by Hives. So I'm also really interested to hear you speak about that. And the way that it has been deployed, in my understanding, is to make something legible to the public, specifically around employing people with lived experience, "peers," from the community. And so I know that this is, like, a part of the model, an evolving thing for the organization, what that actually means or looks like—but could you speak to that as well? What that has meant for you and for Hives?

Sarah Common  11:54
Yeah, "social enterprise." A word, a piece of jargon, a funding stream, and a way to share the story, and sell the honey, and the wax candles, and our services, and things, um, that created a stable—well, the goal was to create stability, and sustainability for the organization. To do this community engaged work, this work of tending the land together, to resource it through social enterprise, and to create employment that was flexible, supportive, that like worked with the skills in, in this community, the, like, really rich and diverse skills. And where we've shifted to, is away from that employment model, which was the model that I was engaged in at that resource centre, like a pre-vocational training model, where an honoraria culture was in place ,where folks would be—have their time recognized with food, with transportation, and with an honorarium. 

And what that has evolved to like through much iteration and consultation with our members is to a community supported apiculture model, which is where we find ourselves now. So the honey is still creating revenue, to support a baseline for the administration of the nonprofit. And then, how we layer into that is not with pre-vocational training or supportive employment, it's with relationship where time is honored, and our members are honored as artists-facilitators, and as elders and knowledge sharers. And we've been using a tool that is the CARFAC tool, so an established minimum rate to recognize artists. And so now we do a seasonal rhythm, where our community who are very much a part of our governance, have been a part of that garden, since the garden was created and have been doing work in this frontline community for decades, many of them. So beyond this nonprofit, beyond the relationships that we are in, in this way, you know? They're recognized as artists, and they come and host with us these seasonal celebrations. And they, they create the content, they, yeah, they step in and hold the space. And we're alongside.

Cait Hurley  14:22
I think it's also a huge expression of trust. Because there came a point in the lifecycle of Hives, where we reached 10 years, and that's usually the time where a nonprofit transitions into being a charity or you kind of enter into a new, a new growth cycle. And there's also the alternative, which is that your funding gets cut, or you fold or you burn out, and those were all explored as options. It wasn't until we came into our community, we asked people what they wanted, and did they have capacity to make a pretty radical transformation with us in order to get there. And they said, "yes." And it wasn't a charity. And we didn't want to burn out. And we didn't want to sever the relationships. And we didn't want to abandon the garden, which has no lease agreement. We all had to collectively decide what to do after we'd collapsed into a nonprofit, after we had drifted so far away from what the relationships actually meant to us. And then what? And so we had to think of a model that could hold us and hold all of this work and hold all these relationships and hold the flexibility. And then reach out into our community, and ask, who was providing pre-vocational training? Because it was still important. Who was offering wraparound care? Who was there to be able to support the needs that Sarah and I—not only don't have capacity to, but we don't have particular elements of training that is required to do it ethically, and in a good way. So it was a pretty vulnerable conversation sitting in a room over many years unpeeling these layers and trying to get to something that felt true, so that we could start from there together.

Sarah Common  16:10
Yeah, and if we look at it, over those 11 years, you know, one hive in that first season. And then very quickly, I think it jumped to 70 hives, and about 30 of them were in direct partnership with other nonprofits in the Downtown Eastside and some extended community. And then the other 40, were in agricultural, apicultural pollination settings. And then it grew some more, and there were another 40 that were in backyards, in different neighborhoods, in the city. And this like, grow, grow, grow, to make more honey to make more revenue to support more of this work. And yet, we were never reaching the place where it felt like we could do the wraparound care, like we could offer the structure for the employment and keep the bees in a good way and be on the land in a good way. Be in community in a good way be in relationship in a good way. It just this like push for growth to reach some place where it would all click. We weren't getting there. And we were burning out and starting to— 

Cait Hurley  17:19
And our community was pushing back.

Sarah Common  17:21
Yeah, pushing back like there was, yeah. 

Cait Hurley  17:23
It was too much. 

Sarah Common  17:25
Too much, too fast, not what's being asked for. So now we have nine hives. Last year, we had 20. 

Cait Hurley  17:32
And a CSA model. 

Sarah Common  17:34
And a CSA model where it's 100 shares, $100. And we match that with 100 shares given in community. So 100 shares sold, 100 shares given. And the gardens are places where we move slowly. And where we really consider the relationship with the plants and what they're offering and, and are really trying to get to know our soil, which is a place we came to this year this like recognition that after a decade, working in this garden—and after this garden, having existed for 16 years now too—like do we know our soil? Do we know what these plants need? Like, can we read, can we read what's happening and understand what is needed and then understand what we can resource to bring?

Cait Hurley  18:20
And how do we find grounding in such precarity? You know, we we talk about this all the time, we're going to show up to that land one day, and there's going to be a development sign on it. And we've done the hustle of trying to build relationships with city, with developers, with change makers, with anyone who could give us just a tiny little foothold of security. And it never went anywhere. So what do you do when you've reached the end? And people are still expressing that there's need and still expressing that having a weekly rhythm and a seasonal rhythm around the land, around the red tail hawk, around the hummingbirds, around all of the native plants that have come back on their own terms and in their own ways of dispersal. What do you do in that kind of tension?

Sarah Common  19:11
Yeah, and what is consistent? So, a big piece of the story, which, hearing the hawk, and the hummingbird, and these like native plant voices come in with what you just said, this big piece of the story is that the garden was founded around a fire permit. That, that was organizing happening in community. Beverly Lightfoot, who was at the time working at Vancouver—well then Vancouver Native Health, now Vancouver Aboriginal Health—Beverly struggled for fire permit, founded a sweat lodge, worked alongside fire keeper Veronica Butler. And that has existed all the way through and still exists and is really the heart of the garden—is this ceremonial space, this sacred space, this fire space. That was, yeah, hard fought for, and has, and has been sustained. And now, it just continues and it continues to be the beat, like the rhythm. Are there other, kind of, stewards of the space beyond Hives? And it sounds like that continue? Yeah, yeah,

Cait Hurley  20:16
We've had a couple different formations of how we try to map in the garden. One of the positive sides of being in this dynamic with that land is that it resists ownership in so many ways, because there's no security with it. And so every time we try to map it in some way, maybe borrowing from colonial cartography, it always seems to just evade, and slip, and shape shift, and morph. So, the community cares for this garden in ways that I don't think we will ever fully understand. And there are essential resources that are needed in order to care for this garden—fire, water, soil, air, seeds. And so we've tried to practice relating to those essential resources, rather than trying to map and document and control every single flow of movement, every way that the land is being used. There is a gate around it, and we print keys very openly. The gardens are for everyone. And, right now, we think a lot about the fire keepers, the water keepers, the soil keepers, and wanting to lift them up, the best we can. Those, those people are holding consistent responsibility. And that matters.

Sarah Common  21:50
I'm think—I'm thinking about the keys and I, we haven't tracked it. We've have tracked it at times, and then we also haven't tracked it. And because the bolt sometimes gets cut, and there's a, there's a lock, because we want, when the gate is open, for somebody to have taken responsibility, to be caring for the space, having an eye, making sure people have someone looking out for them, you know? Taking taking care of each other. So this lock exists. And when it gets cut, or the chain gets broken, or you put it down and you forget to lock it to itself, and it goes, we reverse the lock to the key. So the keys are maintained in community and has we've been distributing keys over this decade. And it's always remained the same lock. And we've we've tried to track it, there's like about 20 different organizations who hold keys, and within that, from one to 10 individuals who are keyholders, folks who bring water, who have meetings, who have memorial, who have celebrations, who joined for sweat, who come to the seasonal events—this, it's just like quite prolific. And I don't really know how many keys, but 50 for sure, and probably more.  

And there's this joyful moment that I think of while I'm storytelling this, where I walked—I was leaving an event. Actually, I was leaving that Leanne Simpson poetry and reading, where Cait and I had both been, and I was walking to catch the 20. And so it's probably eight o'clock or something in the evening? It's dark, it's wintertime, and the gate was open. And I just loved seeing it, you know, I have no idea why the gate is open. And it's not, it's not for me, we're not we're not managing or controlling the space where we want it to be open when it's relevant for community to open it. So somebody, it was relevant, and they opened it, and the space was being enjoyed. And it just felt so good to not know. Where, in a decade ago, I would have wanted to know, and I would have crossed the street and gone in and made sure things were I'm air quoting, "okay," you know? Like, I would have done a sweep of some kind to make sure like it's safe, according to me, and that somebody is there being responsible, according to me. And I have no impulse to do that. And it felt so good to trust. And yeah, it's, there's all kinds of times when it's open. And I also love times when I go into the garden and I'm not known. No one's like looking to me for approval to be there or for resources. The garden is resource, people are they're using it as, as they need to, and in very like dutiful, respectful, creative ways. And, I don't need to be like calling attention to my key or my role as an administrator. I can be there as an artist, I can be there as a community member. And similarly, a decade ago, I wouldn't have known how to do that. That has been like a beautiful gift of this organizing in the space.

Cait Hurley  24:51
Yeah, I think that really maps on to the decomposing of the nonprofit and giving yourself space to exist outside of those confines. 

Julia Aoki  24:59
I find that really relatable, in part, because—well, so, I had mentioned prior to starting the conversation that something I'm interested in is this sort of tension between the sort of rigidities of the institution, all of those like interpolating forces of being a nonprofit society, of being, you know, working in service. And those pressures, first of all, you're bumping up against them based on what your particular communal ambitions are, what, what vision you have for yourself, for your community, in terms of your own sort of personal horizon, but also more broadly, what you would like to see realized. And these can be very much in conflict. But I have myself experienced this sort of performativity of the institution like catching myself every once in a while, because in part, you're sort of trying to be the responsible administrator. And there are a lot of forces asking that of you. And sometimes actually, that's coming from community as well. Because you need to represent "well," right? Or, be able to manifest resources. And so that is kind of a requirement. And, yeah, I'd often have to sort of stop myself and ask myself, "is this something that I'm—you know, am I code switching in a way that is ultimately going to loop back and provide for the people that I'm working with? Or am I just doing this, because"—I don't know.

Cait Hurley  26:25
I've internalized the nonprofit, and I'm doing the work of the state for them.

Julia Aoki  26:29
Exactly. Exactly. And this is just the "right" way to do things. 

Cait Hurley  26:33
I feel like this is a nice transition into building a relationship to time and then talking about fireweed.

Julia Aoki  26:39
Yeah, yeah let's.

Cait Hurley  26:41
And our Community Engagement Committee. 

Julia Aoki  26:43
Yes, yeah, exactly. Something that I would love to hear more about is what governance looks like. And governance is something that I feel like both can operate at the level of the state. But also, there's aspects of that, that speak to questions of self determination and representation.

Cait Hurley  27:03
We, we started with a pretty normative model, a Community Engagement Committee, which is so loaded, it's so nonprofit, you know, you, you strike a committee of the board, you call it "community engagement," you're looking for feedback. There aren't really a lot of mechanisms in place about how you're going to integrate that feedback. But you're doing this, this thing. Could be performative, could be really meaningful. Who's to say? But we started it in, we started talking about it in 2017. It took two years to formulate what it might look like. 2019, we struck the committee, it was fully subscribed. I was on the board at the time. I got really into it, I was looking for something to believe in. And, and we started the committee, it was fully subscribed. Same people who are out today are the same people who were in the committee to begin with. And, I think naturally, it was people who wanted access to decision making. But more so the understanding of process behind decision making, because things work really fast. And there was trust, but there was also some really murky boundaries. And the honoraria culture had developed a dependency, which we weren't speaking about at the time. And a lot of the different levers that we had as a nonprofit to redistribute resources, which is ultimately what we wanted, weren't accountable to the ways that we wanted to do it. 

So from 2019 to 2021, we ran the committee monthly. And what that looked like, was, our first introduction to building a relationship to time outside of the nonprofit structure of time, which was hustling grant cycles, just never ending projects, board meetings, AGMs, just constant movement.  But this monthly rhythm was the first time we really got to meet as a community. And I modeled it off of Carnegie Community Action Project, which is where I sort of found my, my footing as a organizer at a time where the room was filled with, with people who have gone on to take major steps in shaping what community organizing can look like, here and so-called Vancouver, and I'm very grateful because it was slow, and it was intentional. And it was on the top floor of Carnegie Centre. And we had our lunch served to us. And it was every week and we talked about the issues and we listened to what each other were saying. And we just slowed everything down. And so I brought a lot of that structure into what we affectionately called the CEC and we just started to vibe together.  It was quite structureless at first. It was focused on eating together, doing some and crafts, and talking about issues that Hives for Humanity was facing in community, that we thought people might want to have a say in. So issues could be as small as, "a new season's coming up. What do we want to say about it? How's everyone feeling?" Or it could be as big as, "we're running into significant conflict, at our location, where our office is and we're feeling policed. Is anybody else feeling like that? How do we respond?" Which ended up being a complete moving of office and a writing of a letter and, you know, taking action together and naming our experience. 

And that ended up getting traction. It was social, it was a bit higher barrier than being in the garden. So it was challenging in a good way. And we started to co-create what we were calling "protocol." And that was ways of being together. And the ways of being together, seemed to always reference back to this garden, on the 100 block of East Hastings.  So we would talk, in sort of almost a boardroom setting style, about issues that we were facing, decisions that we had to make. And then we would go to the garden on a Wednesday, and we would look and we'd say, Oh, hey, look, the fireweed's here. Or, "has anyone noticed that the Devil's club is growing?" Or, "man, this rose is just getting out of control, it's really covering up this other beautiful plant that we want to give some room to." And so we started applying some of the protocols that we were talking about in the garden, and seeing how that shaped us, and reshaped us. And something we all seem to be able to agree upon, was that hope had become a really muddled concept for us. And that the nonprofit seemed to want us to continuously hope for something that was never going to be attainable. And actually, we didn't even really want it. And so we came to the garden, and we're thinking about hope, thinking about grounded hope, thinking about what holds us together. And we noticed that the fireweed had floated in one day, and taken root on the brick wall, which is sort of half crumbling. And I think it's just stuck in all of our mind. There was some plant teachers who came and offered some wisdom around this. Laurie Schneider, I think is who one of our board members, Jim, talks about quite often. 

And then the next season, the fireweed had come down from the wall into one of the garden beds and had started expanding. And so we sort of expanded with it. And we started noticing who the pollinators were that were visiting, what the roots looked like, wondering if there were things that we could do to give back to the fireweed, if there were ways that we could be cared for by the fireweed. And it just evolved really slowly, really intentionally. And it was this rhythm that was so much more than just meeting monthly in a boardroom. It was a rhythm of care. And over the years that has graduated into something that we call "fireweed time," which is a restructuring of the nonprofit. So when we talk about decomposing, what we're talking about is reorienting our relationship to time to be with the land, rather than making the decision in the boardroom and then going out to the land to see where it happens. We're making the decisions with the land and then we're going into the boardroom and we're trying to translate that into tactics.

Sarah Common  33:25
Yeah, I was thinking about the dispersal of the seeds. And just the play in that as well like the, the joy in the midst of the grief that the seed dispersal offers this wand, these twisting, cracking, opening, fluffy, tiny seeds that are taken on the wind that disperse, and how, like we have been interacting with that. You know, it's another—this way that we talked about honeybees, too, at the beginning, of like, how the feeling of when you hold a frame, you're in communication with honeybees. They're, they're responding to your vibration, and how we can see the impact of our movements and of our presence and of our intention in the colony as they grow, as we tend them, and, and how plants offer that too, and how fireweed has really—it's, it's so, yeah, tangible, you know, we, we shake the seeds, they swirl off in the wind, and then they're growing out of the mossy bricks along the back alleys, the SROs. They're growing now in another garden further down. So tracking time and tracking our presence. And this, like, idea of leaving evidence that the fireweed is collaborating in with us.

Cait Hurley  34:45
They also teach us how to hold each other through change. And something else that happens when you spend a decade in a frontline community that experiences waves and waves of crisis is that you have to build tactics, of how to hold each other during change. And I have learned so much from my elders on the 100 block of what radical community care looks like, and holding people together. And I continue now to learn from fireweed. Fireweed resists ownership, resists permanence. Fireweed's a soil builder, fireweed stabilizes with its rhizomes. And it's always sort of in this dispersal looking for the next place to be. And when it's not needed, you notice that it starts to kind of slip away. And that's been really beautiful for us as organizers, who are now entering into a new life stage. What is our role, amidst all this change? How do we make way for succession, because succession is essential. We can't hold all this change, our peers who are in our same age group can't hold all this change. The youth who are coming up need to know how to hold change, this is the path that they're walking and, and moving through. And fireweed has been a connector for us, it's helped us to open up different ways of thinking, not just about time, but about our relationships to place, and to each other, and to capacity. And I'm grateful for that.

Julia Aoki  35:22
And this is a shared language and vocabulary across everyone that you're working with? And so it sounds like it's like an anchor for the conversations, sometimes very difficult conversations that you need to have perhaps about that changing dynamic of the organization.

Sarah Common  36:01
And a bit of a beacon, too. When we talk about it, we experience this thing of okay, yes, like fireweed and, and, you know, the fuchsia blooms, and the green leaves, and this like beautiful seed—and sometimes that's it and then often though, somebody will have like heard everything behind it and knows fireweed for themselves, too. So this connection happens. And when it happens, grounded in fireweed, the relationships that grow have been

Cait Hurley  37:06
Deeper. 

Sarah Common  37:07
Yeah, deeper. Like, very different than the, the grounding into the honey, which because of the way honeybees can be manipulated, because of their social behavior, and because of how apiculture and agriculture has come to use them and extract from them, it's a, it's a very different relationship to time. And then it's a very different way of relating. And so, this, this movement, and sharing the story in this different way, has really transformed the way relationships grow, and transformed the way we consider reciprocity. I'm like so grateful to fireweed for that, and to you Cait, and to this way of noticing fireweed that happened in the garden, in this way of like listening to that offer, and allowing it to reshape.

Cait Hurley  37:56
Yeah, when, when we talk about shifting relationship dynamics, that has been a practice that we chose to document over the last couple years, because one of the things that happens when you collapse into a nonprofit, is that you just end up embodying the roles that have been set out for you. And it happens in subtle and not so subtle ways. You know, through grant applications, through budgeting, through society documentation—it just all ends up coming into whatever the path of least resistance is. And so when we decided we weren't going to be participating with that anymore, and we had anchored with fireweed, and we did feel like our community was speaking to us towards a shared future that we wanted, we had to find the shape, as you say, Sarah, that can hold us.  And so we looked to the transformative justice project and of the Bay Area called SOIL—very beautifully named. And that's a project by Mia Mingus, who is an incredible transformative justice and disability justice activist, and creating very accessible tools for how to implement the conditions that will grow an abolitionist future. And that's where the comment that Sarah talked about, "leaving evidence" comes from. So, she offered this idea that we must leave evidence that we were here, that we survived, and loved, and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt, and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence that there are other ways to live past survival, past isolation.  And that was the closest definition I think I'd ever felt to hope, in our context. 

And so we started attending some sessions. We downloaded all the open source resources, we started doing a little due diligence around the history of what is called "pod based organizing models," and then we just jumped in. And it was messy. And we mapped, and we related to each other. And we learned a lot about how we hold relationships and the ways that we're predisposed to hold relationships, what our tendencies are, how to hold the person, rather than the institution, or the nonprofit or the charity. What are the logistics of redistribution? We can talk about things like mutual aid, land back, these big huge concepts that are so important to get out into the world. But when it comes down to implementing them and practicing them, what are the step-by-step actions that help bring us closer to that? So we've been using a pod map over the last, formally the last year, but in research last couple years.

Julia Aoki  40:53
Can you describe that?

Cait Hurley  40:55
Yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. And I think you should link it to this too. 

Julia Aoki  40:58
Okay. Yes, we will.

Cait Hurley  40:59
So it's called a SOIL transformative justice pod map. In the very center, you define your pod. So at the beginning, we were calling it an "accountability pod," we wanted to have witnesses to this process. And we wanted to recognize the capacity of our community. So we put accountability at the center. And then there's a ring around that one. And we put Sarah and myself, because we were really the only ones who were looking for accountability at that moment. And then there was an outer ring, which we put the name of anyone who we felt was in relationship with this garden. Coming to it, relating to it, tending it, caring for it, and all of that ring is in a dotted line. And that dotted line signifies that there's potential to step into the inner pod. But the conversation maybe hasn't happened, the terms aren't clear. There's some practice that needs to be embodied. And we need to understand what somatic consent might look like to step into an organizing relationship where we're taking accountability and taking responsibility for this garden. And then the outer ring is the institutions, nonprofits, charities, any lever of the state, that resources are currently being distributed through. And so we mapped all that out. And then it invites you to check in every month and see how things have changed, and reflect, and show, and share. And we invited in care workers from our community. So anyone who is practicing care technologies, and that looks different for everyone. It can be ancestral reclamation, seed saving, embodiment practices, elder care, street moms, auntie networks, administrators who are working between systems, mutual aid redistribution, grief workers, death doulas—like these are people in our network, who are pretty under resourced, and incredibly precise when it comes to their analysis of this work. And we invited them in to be in this map with us. And that's where we're at today.

Sarah Common  43:09
It's a really beautiful thing to behold. So there's this, yeah, this inner, that currently is still Cait and Sarah. And then the dotted line, it's like, it's prolific, there's so many people who are reaching to the garden who show up in the garden. So much potential for these conversations to embody the relationship. And then also to see in the outer circle, like what it's taking to have the garden existing the way it does now, like where the water comes from, where the fire comes from, where the earth and the seeds, where there's the room to, like, breathe, where there's like funding—all these pieces of the nonprofit, all these really tangible resources we need.  So there's maybe 20 outer, kind of bubble, maybe 30 or 40, and ever growing layers in the, in this liminal or in this like transition, in this question place. And, yeah, this question of redistribution at the center, and feeling the bounty of these relationships, like feels so beautiful to be in, and wanting to equip people with the resources that they're identifying to be in the garden in the way they want to be in the garden feels, like, yes, that's what, that's what this is about. And, somewhat, it's where we started too, so it feels like a return to the core of what this nonprofit was founded to do. And then, like that feels so strong, and so true. And yeah, it's like quite a journey, you know, over the 11 years to come back and to be deepening now what was always there, and learning like what— 

Cait Hurley  44:50
Gets in the way? 

Sarah Common  44:51
Yeah, what gets in the way of what really doesn't work, like this, like, growth model, this nonprofit industrial complex, these, like, ideas of social enterprise, these hoops we jump through to get the funding, do the next thing, do the next thing. When actually when we come to it, it's this pod that works, it's relationships.

Cait Hurley  45:08
And it's being able to define and build the relationship on your own terms. Something we noticed as well, being people who have experienced both nonprofit organizing and otherwise, is that many people have never experienced the relationships that they longed for, or the notion of a community is not attached necessarily, to the practice that is being longed towards. And so taking the time to build that. And in the places where we don't know how, looking to the plants, and saying, "they know how. They've been doing it, forever." And it's, it's brought a closeness that I didn't know was possible.

Julia Aoki  45:53
Could you, could you speak to the limitations of this work? Where you felt friction? And not to say that the limitations are organizational limitations, but the pressures on an organization, they're so ingrained in the way people work, and they're reinforced by every organization that are operating in a similar way, or by the. kind of, the way the state is galvanized. And not only in terms of what the organization is trying to achieve, will it come up against that, but as its responding to the various crises that you've spoken to, where that's very much, you know, say state level violence. And so often our entry point into trying to transform is at that level of the state, you use the vocabulary, vocabulary of the state, in some ways in order to combat the state. This might be where I'm getting way too big.

Cait Hurley  46:47
No, no, it's okay. Because I'm, words are coming up for me. And it is kind of relevant, for, I mean—it's not kind of, it's completely relevant. And we're faced with it right now. We practice something called "durational care." And durational care, is the practice of holding relationships over long periods of time, amidst change, amidst loss, amidst devastation, amidst all of it. And that's not crisis response. And what the nonprofit did was it pushed us into crisis response for over a decade. And mentally, physically, spiritually, I cannot do that anymore.

Sarah Common  47:24
I cannot do that anymore, yeah.

Cait Hurley  47:26
And so we had to find another way. And it's hard in moments like this, where we're exposed to international crisis, and the drive still wakes up inside of me. And I see my community having the same drive to respond, because it's urgent, and it's needed, and it's right now, and the implications are significant and everywhere. And to practice holding a durational care rhythm, and thinking about aftercare, is a challenging dynamic to sit with. And it's one that we're, we're trying to hold right now, we're trying to think that when you do step down off the front line, where will you go? Because, both of us have had to step down off of frontline situations and had nowhere to go. Didn't know how to take care of ourselves, didn't know how to hold the grief, the pain, the ways that our bodies had reshaped themselves and will never recover. And it's been a real change in the ways that we want to show up in community and the roles that we want to play. 

Julia Aoki  48:24
Can you speak more about that, about durational care, what that looks like?

Cait Hurley  48:28
What durational care looks like is building relationship models that can withstand the violence that's imposed upon us. And that's where the pod comes in. And it's not going to be the final place with it that we land, but it's one step we're taking right now. And durational care is fireweed which comes at the time where it feels like everything has been lost. Amidst destruction, disturbance, cut blocks, fire, natural disturbance, too. The first thing that comes back is the fireweed. It is the beacon of succession. It is the, the root system that stabilizes the soil. It allows for the soil to get strong, it allows for understory and the next stage of plants to grow in. It's gazing towards an old growth future. And that's how we're approaching durational care, is how can we be that soil builder, that root system? What remains the same when everything around you changes? And I'm not sure if that's gonna work, but we're trying it for right now. Because we're noticing it's an absence.

Sarah Common  49:45
I'm thinking about the sharing of process too. And the, like, even in this, you know, like sharing the process, how we're questioning, and how we're trying to detangle and not be recreating the power dynamics that actively and like in ongoing ways are doing harm. The like colonial and capitalist power dynamics that the nonprofit pushes and exists in. How, how do we work to not recreate those, to acknowledge where we were recreating them? Where we, where we continue to? Like, where are we complicit? And how can we name it, talk about it, work in relationship, to come out of it into this other way of, of being? And yeah, listening to our elders, listening to the land, listening to the priorities and the protocols of host nations here. This like constantly question asking and reflecting, and then being with the land and being in these, like, seasonal, like, food-based cultural celebrations and gatherings

Cait Hurley  50:51
And allowing that process to be known. So that we're not burying the evidence, and we're sharing it as transparently as we can, and showing that there could be a pathway. This is what it would look like, this is what we wouldn't do again, this is what we would do again. This is who held us in this very specific way that we didn't know we needed.

Julia Aoki  51:17
It's really beautiful. I feel like the way that the conversation is unfolding is both, you know, the sort of chronological trajectory is, I think, really illustrative. And there's something very rooted about the way you speak about it in terms of relationships and models of working. There's so clearly, I think, like a broader philosophy that's wrapping your work. And that's captured very beautifully in the way that you both speak. You both have a, an ability to speak to your work in a way that I think is very evocative. So yeah, I really appreciate that. But I can just put it to both of you, if there's anything you feel like we haven't touched on in this conversation that you'd like to speak to.

Cait Hurley  52:00
Yeah, I mean, something that's coming up for me is, what do we want? You know, we want to protect the land. We want to have a place for the community as it continues to grow and evolve, that tells the story of this moment in time and the moment of time before, and the moment of time before. And we also don't want to get in the way if that land ends up becoming affordable housing.

Julia Aoki  52:25
Thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed that conversation. Thanks, guys.

Sarah Common  52:31
Thank you.

Cait Hurley  52:32
Thanks.

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Julia Aoki  52:39
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Cait Hurley and Sarah Common. Head to the show notes to learn more about Hives for Humanity and how to become a member and receive a seasonal share of honey, candles, and salves from their community supported apiculture program. This is the last episode in our special series, See how We Run! Conversations with arts and cultural workers. You can check out past episodes on our website or your podcast listening app of your choice. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.

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