I have migrated to Oakland, where I am borrowing an apartment from an old friend. The first thing I found when I opened the kitchen cupboard was a mug featuring the name of a long-closed coffee shop and the slogan A Place to Be. By Youth for Youth.
Normally I would have frowned and immediately blocked the whole thing, but since I’ve acquired appropriate and timely emotions the sight made me wince in pain.
Twenty years ago my entire life centered on the creation of something called the Youth Initiative – and the corollary establishment of an autonomous multi-purpose center where we could do whatever we liked.
The coffee shop idea started from my particular vision but it was a group project. Ten or so people worked collaboratively to establish nonprofit status, raise money, work the media. I was the person with the clipboard, directing (KTS would say badgering) everyone to work together toward what in retrospect was quite a lofty goal.
The pain and rage of the car accident had stripped away everything else, and I threw myself into work as an imperfect solace. The Youth Initiative was the center of my life, the one thing keeping me alive long enough to testify in the lawsuits. It was the all-consuming passion that occupied me as school and friends were beyond reach.
My accomplishments inspired people to write my letters of recommendation for university, convinced half a dozen scholarship boards to fund my continuing education, put me in the papers and on television.
It was also the place where I learned everything I needed to know about organizational chaos, the limits of idealism, and the endemic nature of human corruption.
I remained fully committed until the whole thing was launched and viable, but eventually left to go to college, distancing myself from the group because I felt it really ought to be run by the people who used the facility.
Jen K remained on staff for a few more years, and helped navigate the eventual closure, a pattern she would repeat in other jobs. She was literally the last one standing when one of the most spectacularly famous dot.coms succumbed to bankruptcy; it was her hand that locked the door on the last day.
Toward the end of my grad school career I went back to do a case study about the Youth Initiative (participatory research methodologies, anyone?) and was not at all surprised to find that the project had been hijacked by well-meaning adults who imperiously directed that the activist portions of the endeavor – condom distribution and environmental protests, for instance – should be eliminated to pander to the foundations that gave us money. Of course, once the idealism vanished, the project died.
During the course of my research I obtained all of the institutional archives: the newspaper cuttings, videos, television clips, awards, the tangible documentation of what we accomplished.
By the time I finished the case study nobody was around to take the files back. The whole muddle is intact on a shelf in the basement of my Portland house. Jen K has the cups, t-shirts, posters, ephemera.
We’re both just two kids from the county who somehow managed to stumble away. The fact that we have this strange, complicated history is amazing. It is an honor and privilege to know her so many years later, and to be a guest in her home.
