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The PA Share Toolkit is a chance to figure out how to make this happen in your community. This model is inspired by DIY PHL in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Check out the poster and full list of contents here, download the PDF here. Illustration by Pia Barnett, development and layout by Elise Granata.

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Dial some buttons, use some words, Save the Ché!

A few weeks back I featured a post about the recent lawsuit brought against The Ché Café Collective by the University of California at San Diego. Read that for some context. UCSD has decided to move forward with the eviction process, with a court date slotted for October 10th. This is a maneuver that takes any negotiations off the table that could save this historic, all-ages DIY mainstay.

Here's a cool thing in a sea of uncoolness: You can help. There's a massive 'Phone Zap' campaign being organized today (Thursday, October 2nd) that will overwhelm the UCSD administration with calls urging them to halt the eviction process, and place negotiations back on the table. 

Check out the Save the Ché Phone Zap Action page here. Here's what you could say:

"Hello, my name is _______ and I am calling to demand that the University of California San Diego drop its eviction lawsuit against the Ché Cafe Collective and return to the negotiating table in good faith."

Here are the numbers you call: 

Phone number of the office of Chancellor Pradeep Khosla: [phone] Work phone number of Chancellor Khosla's secretary: [phone]  Phone number of Asst. Vice Chancellor Gary Ratcliff: [phone] Work Phone number of Asst. Vice Chancellor Ratcliff's secretary: [phone]

If you can't move yourself to be talkative, you can sign the ongoing petition here. Check out more information about the Phone Zap here.

Meanwhile the Ché is continuing to throw free FEM FESTS, expand their hours and add food (vegan donuts! I SAID VEGAN DONUTS!!), and host fundraising lunches in solidarity with other collective presences on campus. Seriously incredible in the face of this assault.

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The LA Fort: Where members pay, play, and make decisions together.

(Read the whole thing here.)

Excuse the double hitter of The LA Fort posts between last week and this week, but they are pretty awesome. (They're also in the running to receive $100,000 in LA 2050-- vote for them before September 16th here.) Back in August, I sat down with Matt Himes, Cameron Rath and Carmen Morales to talk about their membership structure.

And their membership structure is so cool! Here's the deal: to join, you commit $20 and 10 hours of involvement per month. From there, you participate in monthly General Meetings to discuss everything from events to day-to-day operations of this all-ages experimental art space. You get to vote about what happens. And their Bill of Rights and Commitments are deeply tied to everything the Fort is about. Here's a sample from their Bill of Commitments:

● To mentor new members. ● To hold The Fort in the best possible light through personal actions. ● To act with mutual respect and courteousness toward their fellow members and address issues as they arrive. ● To educate oneself about the Fort's governance structure. ● To educate oneself about the Fort's operations and business. ● To ask for help when needed or wanted. ● Our common welfare should come first; The Fort's success depends upon unity as a whole.

It is really exciting to me to think about membership as an opportunity to create buy-in among the people that care about your space. This buy-in doesn't only exist via their membership dues, but also through time. Through their timebank hOurworld, members exchange favors and hours with other members of the Fort. What do you think about this model versus other loosely structured, non-monetary alternatives? Read on for an awesome interview.

I want to talk to you guys about your membership structure. How did you develop this? I feel like at least in museums and those kinds of institutions, memberships are so much more geared towards the benefits and not tied into responsibilities as well. It seems like you guys meshed together a couple different ideas for structure.

Matt Himes: We were heavily inspired by The Vera Project in Seattle. They made In Every Town: An All-Ages Manualfesto. We were really inspired by that book. We saw that they've been doing their thing for a long time, which is something very rare in the DIY scene to actually have physical space for as long as they've had it.

Cameron Rath: That's where we first read about DIT (Do it Together) too, and that idea of membership. America was built on small-scale communism. A lot of communist communities in the 1800's, a lot of anarchist communities...

MH: They didn't call it that back then, but essentially that's what they were doing.

CR: Josiah Warren for me is a huge inspiration. He's commonly referred to as the first American anarchist, and developed timebanking which we use. Our membership structure has changed a lot since we first started. There's a lot of trial-and-error. If there's one thing that we know for sure it's that we don't have all of the answers. So we always try things for a while, and some things stick and others don't. Something that's big for us is always assessing what we're doing and figuring out what parts of this aren’t working, and what we can do to improve them.

What is that assessment like for you? Is it mostly anecdotal?

MH: We actually have three regular membership meetings for general members. There are about four of us who take up the most responsibility. When it comes down to it, us four do a lot of the back work behind the Fort, so the ones that choose to do all of that meet every Monday and we just check in with each other. The biggest thing we've learned is how important constant communication is. I talk to Cameron almost every single day and we live on opposite sides of the town. Carmen, too-- we're constantly e-mailing and calling each other.

CR: And originally when we first started, we tried to have it be that everyone's voice was equal...

Like, non-hierarchical?

CR: Yeah, but it is very difficult when it's quite obvious that some people are putting in a lot less effort but their voice has the same weight. There were points when we'd make a decision around something that needed to happen in the space, and when that day came it was just the 4 of us who showed up to do it.

MH: We have hierarchical systems now. But it's only hierarchy out of the amount of participation. So if you wanted to do administrative responsibility stuff more, there's no one telling you that you can't. You don't have to ask permission, or anything like that. It's more of a question of: You want to be more active? Then be more active. If you don't, okay, but we still have rent to pay and things to do so we have to move on. So that's when we developed the meetings we have now. Every first Monday, we have our Production/Operations meeting which deals with any live music or art events (that includes in-house and out-of-house), and Operations which is pretty much the fancy term for all of the business paperwork crap that no one wants to do but it has to be done to pay our rent on time. And then the second Tuesday of the month is our Programs and Services meeting: programs are non-live music events like yoga, craft night, poetry night, silkscreen-- anything that involves in-house programming. And then our third Wednesday of each month is just the General Member Meeting where we check in with each other and have a little mixer afterwards with food and drink to get to know each other better.

CR: And that's a good one for people who aren’t necessarily members yet, but are interested in poking around.

MH: All three meetings are open to the public and to members. Our biggest thing is that you reap what you sow. You're going to get out how much you put in. There's no one telling you that you can or can't do something. You want to do something? Okay, let's figure out if this is financially feasible-- that's the only real thing that you have to plan out. Just get your budget in order and let's figure out how to get it done. There aren’t really any real restrictions on taste or aesthetic or anything on that level whatsoever.

(Read the whole thing here.)

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Why the LA Fort is competing for $100,000 in LA 2050 right now

(Read the whole post on Grasstronaut here!)

While "Don't quit your dayjob" is still the favorite thing to say from dads everywhere to their kids starting DIY projects, grassroots arts funding will remain an issue. The cash sources are limited: Door money is awesome, but often is just enough to maintain what's already happening in a space rather than making room for growth. Grants are an option, but require a lot of people power. As we saw from Silent Barn and the Ché Café, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe wind up being popular for spaces in a time crunch without a ton of resources. Which is more often than not.

Members of The LA Fort

LA 2050's Grants Challenge is a really interesting mix of these last two options. It works like a grant in that you fill out questions in an application. It works like a crowdfunding site in that a ton of people vote, so it involves public input in some way. Check out The LA Fort's voting page here. After spending some time with The LA Fort recently, it was awesome to hear their excitement around LA 2050's Grant Challenge, and how the mission of the Challenge tied in with theirs. The LA Fort is a two-year old, all-ages multi-use arts warehouse in Downtown LA. With a ton of renovations and legal work in development, they're perfectly poised to be a recipient of one of the $100,000 parcels LA 2050 is giving out. They offer a space to the community that's hard to find in the city, and even harder to find in Downtown Los Angeles. You can and should vote for them here.

Both The LA Fort and LA 2050 grew out of a community need. LA 2050 is a baby of the Goldhirsh Foundation, with a focus on what the ambitious title sounds like: What do we want Los Angeles to look like in 2050? What will it take to get there? By working with over 30,000 Angelenos through awesome block parties, youth-led interviews and more, the initiative developed a vision for five goals in LA's future. They envision LA in 2050 as a place to Play, Connect, Live, Create, and Learn. The LA Fort comes in as a major player in LA's reality of 'Create'; So do 62 other submissions who are now competing in the 'Create' section for $100,000 in LA 2050's Grant Challenge.

(Read the rest of the post on Grasstronaut here!)

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Save the Ché: San Diego Collective Files Lawsuit Against University of California at San Diego (UCSD)

(Read the entire update here.)

The Ché Café Collective has made their home at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) for the last 34 years. Turns out UCSD is really, really not good at playing House.

Some brief history: Since UCSD students formed the Ché Café Collective in 1980, the all-ages space has become a fixture in the international DIY music scene. They function as a volunteer-run co-op on the University campus, and decently co-existed until the University started to create weird false-flag situations to evict the Ché. That started as early as 1993. Since then, there have been several attempts to evict the space with the most recent attempt happening this May. The administration attempted to dissolve the space based on falsified costs of renovation for fire code's sake. For now, the dispute centers around whether or not the fire code regulations are mandatory or simply "recommended." But the dollar discrepancy is huge. UCSD claimed these repairs would cost a prohibitive $700,000, while the Ché is only aiming to raise around $80k for fire-related safety renovations.

(Read the entire update here.)

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Silent Barn: Kunal Gupta on community outreach, public meetings, and friends who stick around.

(Read the entire interview here.)

The Silent Barn's story is rooted in survival. In that mode, it's easy to look inward to the exclusion of anything that doesn't directly feed to your day-to-day existence. It's even easier to stay there. This is all a built-up segue to why it is especially awesome that even without a physical space (keep reading for that story), Kunal Gupta and a team of community outreach folks from the Silent Barn were actively connecting with their new neighbors in the Bushwick community.

Here's some context: The original Silent Barn location in Ridgewood, Queens was home to humans, multimedia arts projects, and a metric pile of all-ages shows. Then, in an incredible act of theft, $15,000 worth of personal belongings and Silent Barn equipment was stolen in July 2011. Not long after, the city shut them down for housing violations. The space had to close. There was a massive hole left over from their seven years as an all-ages, DIY entity that made space for everything from an experimental basement arcade to daily shows. By the end of that summer, a vision for the next Silent Barn found its sea legs. The Barn would not only reemerge into a new physical venue, but would do it legally in an effort to be a more sustainable space. A massive Kickstarter campaign raised over $40,000. Organizers sought extra funding from outside investors. There was a major call-to-action for volunteers with skill sets ranging from plumbing to accounting. After some serious search and research, the Silent Barn reopened in early 2013 at their new Bushwick spot. Since then, there has been a shift in their story. Now, it's about strengthening: the new 3-floor space features eight living studios and over 20 working studios (a synthesizer factory! a barbershop! art in living rooms!), a recording studio, multiple performance spaces, and rotating audio and visual Barn Art that lives among the space.

This interview happened on a phone call in February 2014. A lot has happened since then which you can check out here.

What exactly is your role within the Silent Barn?

It’s a funny conversation. I used to live at the old space which was the Silent Barn, but a different project, and that was kind of a job. One of the fun things about it was that there were four or five of us who lived there-- a few friends who we trusted-- and any one of us could use the space for whatever we felt like. All of the work was done on volunteer time. We would do wide-reaching cross-cultural stuff. We could host music that needed a home and needed a push to grow with 5-10 person shows. And because I was the minority in the building, I had something going I didn’t even recognize. All of the shows I did had minority groups performing in them. I had no idea it was this pattern, I just thought that was what I identified with. It was about communicating “This is what this thing is like. No, we’re not against you. We’re not using you, you’re not using us. We’re actually going to be friends.” People weren’t used to that. They were used to people using one another. Silent Barn is about getting excited about whatever DIY means.

At the new Barn, we tried to set it up with a bunch of people. We split into a lot of working groups which proposed a horizontal body for what the Silent Barn is. However, these working groups have a lot of autonomy. There are different administrative groups of people who figure out the Barn, or shows, or list management, or finances-- all these groups have a lot of autonomy but the exciting point is where all these converge. It’s about as horizontal as it gets. Another group is the LLC, and there are five of us on that list who are also on the bank account and all of that. We haven’t worked on that project too much in relation to the Silent Barn, but have been giving it attention while working in other groups the whole time.

Read the rest of the interview here.