What making community compost means now

A few thoughts over coffee <3

This is a revised and slightly expanded version of a piece I spontaneously posted onto Notes yesterday. It felt worth digging into more.

Some shots from the community compost. :)

It’s hard to know what to say right now.

On January 7th of this year, I closed on purchase of a small home in the Glassell Park region of Los Angeles and moved. This was a dizzying lifetime high, the culmination of over ten years of saving and five years of looking (although only in earnest this past year). I felt disembodied with joy watching my dog run happy laps around her new yard, after we’d both spent the better part of the last half-decade cooped up in far too small of an apartment.

Then I settled down and read the news.

Many of the major headlines had not escaped my attention, but their details certainly had. The sheer and limitless atrocity of the people in charge right now. The increasing militarization of our government, and their escalating and demented aggression against people—citizens and non-citizens alike—who live here.

I know I only write about compost here, but I also help oversee a community compost, which is attached to a food justice nonprofit, which runs a patchwork of free food distribution centers across the city, where I also sometimes volunteer. ICE started showing up at those locations early last year, a few months before they started making proper headlines in LA, and a few months before all-out and sustained public protest began to emerge.

At the time, the nonprofit issued a warning to volunteers and staff, then restructured their food lines so they could minimize exposure of community members to ICE agents, who would show up and just kind of …. wander around nearby. Word of their presence quickly spread, though, and one particular neighborhood found itself swarmed with protestors for an evening. They filled the streets and made a lot of noise, banging on cars and such and generally causing a scene.

The people who lived in the neighborhood were upset.

I don’t know if the protestor’s actions were effective that night, they very likely were. But I also know that people who lived where they went, who were also ICE’s targets that night, felt overwhelmed and frightened by the noise, and acutely aware that their neighborhood was suddenly flooded with strangers. Good intentions aside, many of the protestors simply had no prior involvement in the neighborhood they were trying to protect, and the people there did not know them. As a result, some of those people felt terrorized, and then frustrated by the mess that was left behind for them to clean up.

When I heard about this, I felt conflicted. People putting themselves in harms way to stop their neighbors being brutalized is ultimately a positive thing, full stop. It’s brave and necessary. But how to avoid the above scenario? How to best join hands across communities and do what needs to be done without getting in the way and causing more problems? Does it matter how we do it as long as it gets done?

The conclusion that I ultimately came to is that if we really want to “help” in situations like this, that work doesn’t start when ICE shows up. That work started yesterday—it started ten years ago, twenty years ago—when we get out there and start working in service to the people who live around us, before there’s an emergency. It’s the much slower and more sustained effort that includes building relationships and knowing the people and city around you, so you’re already the known presence when shit hits the fan. You’re already involved; you’re already there.

This was a truly humbling revelation for me, as obvious of one as it may be. I have been the unknown person before. In many ways, I am still the unknown person. I think we’re all getting a crash course now on solidarity, protest, how to fight, and what our courage looks like—last year, around this time, this was the beginning of mine. I’m trying so hard to be there, not by what I say or post, but by showing up and knowing people.

But I’m still afraid, and I still feel so hopeless some days.

The good news, I want to say, is that some of the work that needs to be done now addresses both that feeling and the problem before us in simultaneous ways. I do think we need to figure out how to be active right now, not just reactive. We need to fight, but we also need to build—and the “building” part can be far less exhausting, more nurturing, more connective, and kind. It can help us feel less overwhelmed and ignite our sense of resilience.

What do we want our communities to look like? What do people need that we can provide? Can you volunteer or donate? Write something, cook something, talk to someone, do some research, show up to your neighborhood council meetings to see who’s in the room and what they’re asking for?

I know a lot of people are already doing this type of work, and I also think what we need sometimes is just a little bit of an encouragement that it actually matters. So I also just want to say: it does. It matters!

I originally wrote this essay in a twenty minute spurt while sitting in my new yard, drinking coffee, after which I shut my laptop and immediately left for my weekly volunteer compost shift at the community garden. I’ve now moved from that neighborhood, but I’ll still be there every week, turning the compost and hanging with volunteers, and trying my damndest to build something—anything!—instead of merely dissolve in fear about what’s being taken away from us.

The best time to have started doing this work was yesterday, sure. But the next best time is always today.

Love,
Cass