Part2
The story of the Coop, Part 2:
How Alisha turned The Co-op from a dream into a reality
Mark Egerman to Benjamin Saalbach-Walsh, Dec 5, 2006 2:49 AM
So last I checked, I had left off in quite a mess. My big idea, Crowded Fire, had failed, and I had seen my own limitations as an organizer. Indeed, Sophmore year was starting off pretty rough and immediately after September 11th, things were a little confusing. Yet the CMU community responded fabulously and the intrepid group of activists that I had surrounded myself with were pulling through. We held a teach-in on September 17th, where students and faculty spoke in front of the fence to hundreds of community members. I still remember Stu Anderson's speech imploring restraint in our response "The scales of justice cannot be balanced with the bodies of the dead."
At the time I was living in Cathedral Mansions, with a good number of people who would eventually become co-op members. My old roommate Ryan Hamilton lived a few floors below me (in my old room), Brent Selby lived on the 7th floor (near almost member Priya Shah) and Denia Djokic on the 3rd; both freshman who I had met either as an OC or just being social. Also on the fourth floor with me was Alisha Bhagat, a freshman who had joined up PWR. The putative head of PWR, Matt Toups kept trying to introduce us and get her more involved, but things were crazy back then and it never happened. We'll get back to her.
Following the success of the first peace rally, we decided to do another, this time with Pitt students. For whatever reasons, we decided to make a giant peace banner and drop it from the Cathedral of learning. This was my job. Others were taking care of publicity, and so on. And when I say a big banner, I mean really big. So the day before the rally, we got lots of cloth, staples, and paint, and set out to make the thing.
A large crew of people stapled together the material we had gotten and some of us drove up to Mellon Park to find a flat place to lay out the whole thing in order to paint it. Of course, after an hour, as we were waiting for it to dry, it started to rain. Panic sets in as we try to stop the still drying banner as the whole thing got drenched. We rip the seams and roll it back up into bags, throw it into whomever car we had borrowed and headed to Cathedral Mansions.
There, we borrowed hair dryers from everyone we knew and a team of four people or so aired out the strips in pieces, using the driers, fans, anything. The strips were so long that we had to do it out in the hallway and in some locations, there are still marks from irons that were left too long. In all of the excitement, it became obvious that dropping the banner, despite being a great idea, was actually a bad idea. We had invited people to the protest without letting people know that we would be doing something, that well, would be potentially putting them at risk. We were concerned that the banner would cause damage or that the campus police wouldn't appreciate it, or whatever. So we decided to cancel the drop and just figure out something to do with the banner.
It ended up looking like this: http://www.post-gazette.com/journal/photos_display.asp?ID=5325
Told you it was big.
Cancelling the drop caused a bit of a commotion. We had no clear communication lines, or decision-making structures. I had just taken over a project because I was charasmatic and people listened to me, but my authority only went as far as those things continued. The rally was a huge bust in many ways. Well, in pretty much every way, we had no content, just lots of chants and hand holding and a really big sign. Another lesson learned, that communication and decision-making are essential in organizing, even in ad hoc situations.
By this point there was a loose group of students who were attending these rallies, coming to planning meetings, speaking, etc. Somehow we took the awful name of Students for Peaceful Action (SPA) despite the presence of PSA. Sigh.
The group falters and soon splintered when a smaller group, Zi, left to be more hardcore, or whatever. I was getting disillusioned with the whole thing and found myself hooked up with the Thomas Merton Center. The Merton Center was the largest social group in Pittsburgh at the time and was impressed with what had been going on at CMU. They wanted to march, I helped form the anti-war committee and I em'ceed the protest. Here's a badly formatted article for history's sake: http://www.pittnews.com/media/storage/paper879/news/2001/11/12/News/War-Protest.Draws.More.Than.300-1794388.shtml?norewrite200612050231&sourcedomain=www.pittnews.com
These protests were getting boring. I longed for something more permanent. Every group I had ever been in had splintered or folded. Every position of leadership I had taken had shown me that I'm not very good at this. I knew we needed structure, permanence, communication, and so on, but what to do. I read about something at Penn State and proposed to the Merton people that we do a refugee camp at the fence.
So we set up a little camp. We borrowed some tents from the Explorers Club, run by future Co-op founders Erin Pischke and Keara Schwartz, and some people constructed their own. About twenty of us lived at the fence for a week in December, collecting food for local food shleters and weaving blankets to be sent to Afghanistan to assist refugees there (through the American Friends Service). The hope was to use the event to raise awareness of humanitarian problems, to get people involved in donating to that end, and to have a visible presence in the center of campus. So I lived there for a week, which wasn't pretty, but hey, I was looking for my place.
Dozens of people came by for a night or longer. The anarchist collective in town (the what? collective. Seriously, that was their name) joined us and hung out, playing music and talking politics, life, you name it. It was an incredible time. Alisha proved to be perhaps the most dedicated member of the camp, bringing hot chocolate when it got cold, weaving blankets, hanging out, and just being her awesome self. That's when she and I became close.
The camp was a huge success in my eyes and I learned something important about community and the interactions that happen when people are just living their lives together. Also, just about anyone who founded the Co-op came by at one point; it was a great way to meet cool people on campus who wanted to make a difference. And Alisha and I started dating soon afterwards. Everything was in place.
The idea of the Co-op came to me around that time and I started talking to people about it, but it remained idle speculation. You know, like what would happen if we took over student senate and made it work for the students, or what would happen if we created a way for students to teach courses for credit. Oh yeah, somewhere in here I helped start StuCo. Forgot about that, but it was pretty amazing at the time.
The Co-op was just a gleam in my eye, but Alisha was there and I decided it was time to see what would happen if we worked together on a project. We decided to hold a Jewish-Islamic gathering to get students together during a tough time that Spring. Tensions were high, there had been some skirmishes, it wasn't pretty. The sit-down went well, people talked about ways to work towards a more congenial atmosphere, and Alisha and I were a dynamo team, both in creating the event, promoting it, and then running it. Dean Murphy was so impressed he asked us to help him out on his own event of a similar nature.
So everyone will always tell you never to organize with a girlfriend/boyfriend and they are right. But what the hell, this was the best mistake I made at CMU. It was time to go to Dean Murphy with the idea of creating a cooperative in Woodlawn Apartments.
Yes, the Co-op was originally supposed to be located in Woodlawn. By Spring 2002, we had a plan and by Fall 2003 it looked like we had approval. Or so it seemed.
Coming up next: The Woodlawn fiasco, and getting bailed out by Diane. Note: This may seem like it's taking forever, but I'm trying to contextualize the co-op as it deserves. The thing was a miracle of sorts that happened because of the dedicated efforts of a whole community with roots in all of the events above. If it doesn't make sense yet, don't shoot the ushers at intermission, please be patient.