P' Kovit in Boston: explorations, reflections, interview

In early March, P’ Kovit visited Boston for a series of speaking engagements at Brandeis, and we spent an afternoon together exploring urban neighborhoods. I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to catch up with P’ Kovit for the first time in several years, and we hashed out issues relating to a wide range of issues from homelessness and property rights to community banking, organizing, and development.

Explorations

During his visit, I took P’ Kovit to Haley House Café (http://www.haleyhouse.org/) in Dudley Square. Haley House, a Catholic Worker affiliate, houses a variety of functions including a bakery café, bakery training program, youth culinary classes, live-in community, soup kitchen, food pantry and clothing room, and affordable housing. It buys its fruit from Earthworks, a local non-profit that builds urban orchards and cultivates neighborhood stewardship and environmental education curricula around them (http://www.earthworksboston.org/). It also partners with The Food Project to supply its fresh vegetables (http://www.thefoodproject.org/). ENGAGERs might be interested in The Food Project because it fosters exchanges on a micro-scale among urban and suburban youth in the Boston area, creating opportunities for them to work together on urban and suburban farms and sell their produce at farmers markets together.

We also visited an open space system created by neighborhood residents, South End/Lower Roxbury Community Land Trust, and United Neighbors of Lower Roxbury. Two community members showed us around and described their past and current efforts working toward neighborhood improvement and shared his experiences community organizing in Isaan. Similar to DSNI’s roots just down the street (http://www.dsni.org/), neighbors united to address the prevalent dumping of trash on vacant lots in their community. Less than a decade later, they have knit together community gardens, Frederick Douglass Peace Garden, Bessie Barnes pocket park, and a cul-du-sac that they’ve turned into a car-free community plaza, complete with a stage for community performances and celebrations.

Reflections

Spending time with P’ Kovit in northeastern US rather than Siam helped me connect the issues I had learned about studying and living in Thailand and the issues we have back home. Explaining some of the problems, movements, and proposed solutions bubbling in this part of the world magnified the differences between New England and Isaan and made me rethink the range of possibilities available to us in the social change work that we do. For example, I told P’ Kovit about my local bank, Wainwright Bank (https://www.wainwrightbank.com/html/personal/index.html). For me, it qualifies as a community bank because it invests in a number of local and regional community projects through a community grant program, creates free meeting spaces for community groups and non-profits, issues a Social Justice Award, and offers an Equal Exchange CD option that benefits small-scale coffee farmers in Latin America. It also has built an identity and marketing strategy based on diversity, equality, and social justice. In contrast, P’Kovit talked about community savings groups in which everybody contributes some money for community projects. He suggested that this type of activity can create cohesion and momentum for groups who want to make change in the long run. I liked this idea a lot. It reflects a different way of thinking that relies less on institutions and more on self-initiated change. Wainwright Bank and the various credit unions and community banks out there play a strong role in localizing our investments and ensuring their social responsibility. But a savings group can be a viable option for groups in areas where banks are still decreasing and discontinuing their loans to small businesses. It could also function well for more specific efforts to commit and funnel their energy toward a concrete goal.

Another blatant point of contrast from our conversations was the high degree of networking that NGO-CORD and the Assembly of the Poor provide for social movements in Thailand. We have extended our levels of specialization to social change in the States and do not focus very much attention on network and coalition building. Even environmental groups and labor groups, for example, should share common policy points, but they define themselves so differently culturally and organizationally that they don’t link up. I can imagine that a U.S. American reading my interview with Kovit would balk at the proposal that the HIV/AIDS network would carry out protests together with the squatter networks in front of the Government House in Bangkok. One potential umbrella group that may begin to fill this gap could be the Solidarity Economy Network (SEN; http://www.populareconomics.org/ussen/). SEN describes movements clustered in Latin America as well as Quebec/Europe (under the name “social economy”) to promote alternative development based on principles of solidarity, mutualism, democracy, justice, and pluralism. It keeps its theoretical foundation fairly broad (for example regarding distribution of income and property rights) in order to broaden its scope to include all the diverse organizations working for a participatory democracy and social justice.

Interview

After his visit, I wrote up an interview with P' Kovit for publication in Boston's Spare Change Newspaper. A copy of the interview is located on the Surin Farmers Support blog: http://www.surinfarmersupport.org/2009/04/interview-with-p-kovit.html