Before I begin I'd like to acknowledge that we are gathered here
on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watuth and Musqueam people.
I do this with the utmost respect and gratitude,
especially as I'm here to talk about community and the politics of space.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the role that physical spaces play
in building and sustaining social movements,
and I've become convinced over time
that the way that we create and hold space for each other profoundly shapes our sense
of who we are, what we value, and what we are capable of together.
Six years ago my partner Vinetta and I created Rhizome
in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Vancouver.
Rhizome is a place where people come every day to drink coffee eat sandwiches and curry and soup;
but that's only part of the story and I want to tell you the other part;
but in order to do that I need to tell you first a little bit about where I come from.
In 2004, I moved here from San Francisco
where I had worked for a decade as a migrant rights organizer.
I left behind a vibrant community of struggle and a city that's good at telling its own story.
Doing that work in San Francisco, I was always reminded
that I was part of something bigger than myself.
I think that that sense of belonging had a lot to do with the kind of work that I was doing,
but it was also definitely fed by my surroundings.
Every day I would walk to work past murals
that silently told me that nothing is ever won without a struggle,
and that collective liberation is possible.
The amazing thing about these murals is that
thousands of other people walked by them every day as well,
and we all received that same education.
Those murals tell stories of indigenous resistance,
of migrant rights organizing and of revolutionary struggles
for racial and economic justice.
They taught us that we are all products of a shared history.
So with these murals as my guide I felt a deep sense of connection and possibility,
but I don't think that I fully appreciated
the power of this very public and very shared political education
until after I left that city and moved to a place where I had no roots.
When I came to Vancouver I felt a deep sense of loss.
The forces of erasure here felt so powerful and so violent.
The more I talked to people here the more I came to understand
how this history and the constant rebuilding of this city
make it very difficult for us to connect with each other.
I wondered how many stories had been erased here.
My partner and I had always had a dream of being able to create a space
that would welcome people from diverse backgrounds;
where people would be able to be truly seen and recognized;
and where we would be able to help us connect with each other.
We wanted to create a living room for all of us,
and especially for those who had been pushed out of other spaces,
and made to feel invisible.
We wanted to use space to show that our communities face similar challenges,
and that we can envision solutions together.
So when we first walked into the space that would eventually become Rhizome,
we knew that we were in the right place.
Our new landlord showed us around and he showed us the place on the floor
where he had laid the floorboards one summer back in the 1950's
as a teenager during his summer break from high school.
He pointed out the 100 year old tin ceiling,
and he told us fantastic stories
of things that may or may not have happened
in that very room over the years.
For us, all of those stories were seeds of possibility.
As soon as we opened in 2006, people started coming
from all walks of life and from diverse communities,
and it turned out that our personal need to create a shared living room
was a need that many other people felt as well.
And since then we've hosted over 1,000 events
in collaboration with hundreds of community groups.
Many different communities really do now consider this space their home
and have brought pieces of themselves to it.
For example every year we host a traditional latin-american Day of the Dead celebration,
and every year I watch as people meet each other
while placing photos of their ancestors on the altar.
Over the years in this space we've done all of the things
that build community.
We've been able to share our stories, we've learned about critical issues together
through panel discussions and film screenings,
we've argued and debated and planned together,
we've celebrated our victories, and we've done all this in a space
that's intentionally multi-generational, multi-lingual and multi-racial.
Recently we've started hosting courses on community organizing
to help grassroots groups become more focused and strategic.
We've created space for all of us to be able to imagine a better future,
and now to strategize around how to get there.
Over time this really has become a shared project
and it's way bigger than anything that Vinetta or I could ever have imagined.
It's fully supported by the people who use it.
We've been able to experiment with different economic models on a small scale.
We created systems so that everyone can eat here
regardless of how much money they have,
and so that hundreds of people can contribute what they have,
to be able to help maintain this as a shared resource.
Most importantly Rhizome has allowed for connections between different groups
that rarely come into meaningful contact elsewhere in this city.
What we do at Rhizome is explicitly anti-profit,
it's about re-claiming cooperative values in a commodified culture.
Continuing to hold this space
has started to feel absolutely vital.
Every day we're reminded that the world
around us is driven by market values,
and that what we do at Rhizome
is fundamentally different.
We've come to see that our work is part
of a broader struggle to define the very soul of this ever-changing city.
But this struggle only points out to me again
what all of those murals in San Francisco were telling me all along:
it takes a community working together to create something that's worth fighting for,
and then it takes a shared commitment to hold on to that thing.
So we have our own mural now on the wall,
and it reminds us every day of what brings us together.
It reminds us that space like ours can create cracks in the system,
and that those cracks can give us all a transformative sense of possibility.