The Seed and the Story: ARVAC and VISTA, Folk arts and the War on Poverty in Arkansas.

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The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

Alongside researching the history of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, I’ve been reading In Service to America: A History of Vista in Arkansas 1965-1985.  Written by Marvin Schwartz, this 1988 publication traces the VISTA organization throughout the state.   I’ve been particularly interested in the work of this organization in central Arkansas, including the creation of a craft co-op, which served both Yell and Pope Counties.

Created in 1965, VISTA was an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  This national legislation sought to provide lasting and locally based solutions to struggling communities.  Operating much like a domestic version of the Peace Corp, volunteers in the VISTA program received a subsistence wage and lived in economically poor areas where they worked in partnership with community members to generate economic initiatives and help residents gain access to health care and adequate food.  VISTA volunteers, many of them college age, worked to help create grassroots programs which focused on local needs, thus making each VISTA program unique to its region.

In 1960 approximately 40% of the population in the river valley was living below the poverty line.  Illiteracy, inadequate housing, and unemployment were rampant.  One of the first VISTA programs in the nation was the Yell County Economic Opportunity Program, a pilot recipient of an OEA grant.  The organization was soon absorbed into its larger sister organization, ARVAC (Arkansas River Valley Area Council), which hosted numerous national and local volunteers.   ARVAC formed programs such as the Housing Development Corporation, an organization utilizing the rural tradition of barn raising to help low income families secure homes, and ARVAC Rural Folkcrafts, a network which provided a market for rural quilters, white oak basket makers, seamstresses, and other artisans, allowing them to sell their traditional wares and earn a living for their families. Another organization, Counseling Associates (formerly known as ARVAC Community Mental Health Program), began under the ARVAC VISTA program and operates independently today.

In its early days VISTA brought in volunteers from around the nation, but in later years became more focused on long-term, locally based volunteers, which helped the programs thrive.   From the beginning, the goal of VISTA programs was to become self-sufficient. ARVAC stuck around and quickly became a model of successful VISTA organizing.   ARVAC’s craft co-op, which began in 1975, continued throughout the 1980s, as did housing initiative, which later became known as Universal, INC.

Schwartz’s book features interviews with a few river valley VISTA workers, including the late Myrtle Cress who worked in Ola and Betty Burnett who organized a housing co-op in Dardanelle.  It also highlights the work of Lou Vitale who was instrumental in founding the crafts co-op. I’d love to learn more about the creation of these initiatives, how people felt about the work, the craftspeople who sold at the co-op, and the use of the barn raising tradition in area housing initiatives.   Were you affiliated with VISTA?  Did you or someone in your family sell crafts at the co-op?  Perhaps your house was built utilizing the barn raising tradition?  I’d love to hear more.   An extra special thanks to Mike Luster of the Arkansas Folklife Program for introducing me to this book.

Also please don’t forget we’re still working on compiling stories of plants and seeds for our book on stories and gardening in the area.  We’d love to include your story!  To learn more visit us here.  To read a little bit about the backstory of the garden book read this column.

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Box Documentary

Dr. Bronner.

While scanning the Netflix streaming options last night in search for a good documentary to accompany my evening knitting, I came across Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox.  Produced by Sara Lamm in 2007, it’s both an exploration of eccentric beliefs and a profile of a social responsible company.  If you’ve already seen it I’d love to hear your take on it .

You’re probably familiar with the soap, or more so its label, a jumbled series of prophetically sounding run-on sentences about hard work, moral ABCs, and God, all culminating in the phrase, “All-one!”    A master soap maker who lost his parents in the Holocaust, Dr. Bronner escaped from a mental institution before traveling the U.S. selling his soap and, more specifically, the message printed on the bottle. His teachings were a mixture of astronomy, religion (specifically the unification of all faiths), and social commentary, specifically the belief in equality of all humankind.

The documentary centers around Bronner’s youngest son, Ralph Bronner, who travels the United States telling the story of his father and his belief in what he dubbed the “moral ABCs.”  According to the film producers, “68-year-old Ralph endured over 15 orphanages and foster homes as a child, but despite difficult memories, is his father’s most ardent fan.”

It’s a compelling film, unraveling the character of Dr. Bronner from the man himself, a flawed human who put his belief in the need to “unite spaceship earth” above his own children.  Although slow-moving at times with less than perfect footage, the film does a great job teasing out the wisdom of Dr. Bronner’s teachings from his numerous shortcomings as both a visionary and a father.

What I found most fascinating about the documentary (besides an inside look at an eccentric self-proclaimed rabbi), were the slivers of information about his descendants who run the company today.  Ralph is clearly more emotionally complex then he ever lets on, and the film follows his travels as he attempts to connect with strangers, striving to bring his father’s legacy to new generation even as he seeks out his own identity. He meets a New York subway worker and talks of the beauty of the common man. He befriends a piano player who’s caring for his dying friend. Somehow the legacy of soap continues to serve as a window to our common humanity and underlying eccentricities.  (You can read Ralph’s response to the film here).

Alongside Ralph’s bittersweet tale is a glimpse into how the company is run today, the product of Bronner’s relatives who clearly have a deep respect for the man even as they live with troubling memories.  Everything within the business is operated under Fair Trade agreements, workers are paid incredibly well, and the operation focuses on environmental, economic, and social sustainability.  The family doesn’t go around preaching Bronner’s teachings, but rather apply some of the more accessible policies of what Bronner dubbed “constructive capitalism.” According to the film, all of the Bronner descendants have “capped their salaries so that they make no more than five times that of the lowest paid employee.”

Have you seen the film?  What are your thoughts?

You can read more information from the fim’s creator here.

Also check out her interview on NPR here.

Friday Video: Immokalee: A Story of Slavery and Freedom.

Lucas Benitez, ICW. From Yes! Magazine. Photo by Jeffrey Slater

Earlier this week we posted about Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen. One of the people profiled in the issue is Lucas Benitez, a man who helped to form the  Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW).  The Coalition works to fight modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry and organizes for better pay. They operate a low-power radio station, “Radio Conciencia”  as well as a co-op to give families access to affordable food.  They have also led hunger strikes and multiple marches.

From Yes!:

IW started in 1993 when Lucas and other workers got together to discuss working conditions. In 1995, they staged a weeklong protest that forced a grower to change his decision to lower pay. But an incident in 1996 galvanized Lucas and CIW. A teenage field worker had asked his foreman for a water break. The foreman refused; the worker stopped for a drink anyway. The foreman beat the worker brutally. Lucas helped spread news of the attack and more than 500 workers gathered in protest, waving the victim’s bloody shirt. The action grew to a boycott of the foreman lasting several weeks. In keeping with his belief in acting as an animator, Lucas was not the leader of this action. Instead, he used it as an opportunity to build confidence among the farmworkers in their own power and the power of collective action. Lucas keeps the teenager’s blood-stained shirt with him to this day.  To read the entire profile from Yes! go here.

This week’s Friday Video is a short documentary produced by Jeff Imig about the CIW and their fight against unfair wages and practices, including their effective boycott of Taco Bell.  The video highlights both their struggles and successes.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

David Korten Portrait from Americans Who Tell the Truth.

From Americans Who Tell the Truth

We’ve posted many times about Americans Who Tell the Truth, a collection of paintings, quotes and biographies of inspiring Americans working for positive change.   Today they have published yet another amazing portrait, this one of David Korten, co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network, the organization which publishes YES! magazine.  He’s also the founder and president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

From the biography:

David Korten is a leading critic of corporate globalization and a visionary proponent of a planetary system of local living economies. His international best seller, When Corporations Rule the World (1995) helped frame the global resistance against corporate globalization. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (2006), illuminates the significance of this resistance by placing it in the historical context of 5,000 years of Empire and the organization of human relationships by dominator hierarchy. His latest book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth (2009), offers bold economic proposals that address the underlying cause of the current economic collapse, not just its symptoms.

…

While many people refer to David as an economist, he is by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems. From the time he began his graduate studies at Stanford in 1959, he has been seeking to deepen his understanding of how cultures and institutional structures shape human behavior and to search for ways by which we humans can do a better job of supporting one another in achieving the higher order potentials of our nature.

You can read the whole post, as well as quotes from David Korten,  here.  You can follow Americans Who Tell the Truth at their facebook page here.  They regularly post new post portraits, all of which inspire and call us to action.

The Seed and the Story for Wednesday August 10, 2011: The Dardanelle Post Office Mural.

Photo by Author with permission from Dardanelle Post Master.

Originally published in the Post Dispatch. If you are interested in being a part of the formation of the Friends of the Mural group leave a message here or send me an email.  I’ve gotten a few responses already and we will be planning on where to go from here and working with Dr. Seymour to move forward.  Thanks!

As a young girl, my mother would frequently take me with her to drop off mail at our 1930s era post office in Dardanelle.  She’d always point out the New Deal-era mural hanging above the post master’s door.  A three-panel painting depicting the artist’s rendition of industry in the river valley, the two side panels feature men spinning cotton and loading boxes on boats to send down river.  In the larger, center panel are white and black men working in the cotton fields.  “See those people picking cotton,” my mother would say.  “Your grandparents used to pick cotton in Cardon Bottoms.”   My mother loved that mural, and fostered in me a deep curiosity about the history of family and community which fuels my work today.

I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. Gayle Seymour, an art historian at the University of Central Arkansas, who studies and advocates for the twenty one Depression-era murals across our state.  Whether in the classroom or in the communities, Seymour spreads the word about the importance of these public pieces.  The mural in Dardanelle, she explained, was created by Ludwig Mactarian. Born in 1908 in Smyrna and of Armenian descent, Mactarian escaped the Armenian Genocide before coming to New York City at the age of thirteen.  Like most mural artists who applied for the Federal Art Project, Mactarian was a largely unknown and out of work.  He was hired to create the mural for Dardanelle’s new post office under the Percent for Art model, wherein one percent of the building’s cost was allocated for the creation and installation of community art.  This federal program put artists back to work and is known today as one of the most successful public art projects of all time.  One thousand four hundred murals were completed nationwide, all for installation in public buildings known for their high traffic and everyday use.

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Happy Martin Luther King Day.

Martin Luther King. Photo from Democracy Now.

So often King is remembered only for his work in the Civil Rights Movement. But in his fight for human rights he also spoke out against the violence of poverty and war. No doubt we must remember King’s work with the Civil Rights Movement.  But his work was connected to justice in all arenas. He saw issues of violence and human rights as interconnected, and his words remain challenging and relevant today.

Democracy Now! has an excellent program featuring excerpts from some of his most famous and most controversial speeches, including those denouncing the Vietnam War and America’s support of violence in general. There are also quotes from his work in the Poor People’s Campaign which addressed issues of economic justice.

To listen to the program click here.

And let’s pledge to keep working toward the dream. See below to read more quotes.

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Something You Should See: The Natural State of America

From the film's webpage

Last week at the annual conference of the Arkansas Anthropological and Sociology Association, Dr. Bryan C. Campbell, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, played a short clip from his upcoming documentary about the Newton County Wildlife Association and their ongoing fight to keep their forests free of toxic herbicides. The tiny bit of the film that we got to see was incredibly compelling. Beginning with the history of the organization’s founding in 1970, the film focuses on this highly effective and active resistance movement in the Ozarks, detailing how every day people are able to organize and fight to keep their forest safe.  Unfortunately today they face a new host of challenges.

The preview of the film is now available online, and you should really check it out. To watch the preview click here.

The film will be shown at all major film festivals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. To keep up with developments related to the film and to find a viewing location, be sure and become a fan of the film on facebook.  To do that go here.

Dr. Campbell runs Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (think I have posted about this before. If not, I should have!). They preserve agricultural folkways and engage in seed conversation and seed swaps across the state. Check out all the information by clicking here. If you are a seed saver you would love to attend these gatherings.

And, for a little extra info, Here’s a nice article about Dr. Brian Campbell and his work with the Seed Bank at UCA.

The Rural Assembly and the Rural Compact.

Today I came across an organization called The Rural Assembly and I am so excited about their work and I think you will be too. The Rural Assembly is a part of the Center for Rural Strategies, an amazing organization whose fingers are all over most of the rural sustainable movements going on these days.

The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”
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Up the Ridge, a film about remote Appalachian prisons, racism, and the intentional tension between rural and urban

This very important film was produced out of Appalshop’s hiphop radio program, Holler to the Hood.
The film synopsis reads:

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.
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