Co-opers in the Community

If you have a volunteer opportunity, our co-opers want to hear about it!
Email Jennifer at jenniferh@usca.org.

25 Coopers Help Restore Strawberry Creek
March 17, 2007
Written by Sarah Horwitz, Wilde House

English Ivy may be a romantic aspect of UC Berkeley’s greenery, but it turns out to be an antagonist to the native flora and fauna of the local biosphere. Ivy provides a great home for a non-native rat population, and competes with trees and other local bushes for sunlight. That’s what co-opers learned about this past Saturday as we donned work gloves and dug into a veritable blanket of English Ivy that had crept all the way from the bank Strawberry Creek out to the pedestrian pathway leading to the Dawntown Berkeley BART. Working in a long line, co-opers rolled up the carpet into huge ivy balls, hacked it free with saws and clippers, and added it to an ever-growing pile. By the end of the day, the ivy pile was taller than any of us, and filled two entire dumpsters. As we sat back to admire the newly cleared area, we saw that already local brown finches had come to eat bugs and worms, and that we had given a new life to tiny oak trees which had been struggling to break free of the ivy ground cover.

Meanwhile, at Cordenesis Creek, another group of co-opers were using wood chips on black plastic to prevent non-native weeds from continuing to grow and threaten the creek. This involved shoveling the wood chips from a huge pile into a wheel-barrow, maneuvering the wheel-barrow to the desired location, dumping it, then covering the plastic with the chips.

By the end of the afternoon we were sore, tired, and very satisfied with the small bit we had done to repair our local ecosystem.

Rebuilding Together
October 14, 2006
Written by Sarah Horwitz, Wilde House

Long before the sun came up on a beautiful Saturday morning on October 14th, twenty-two co-opers were already starting their day, putting on work clothes, and heading to what ended up being this year’s first—but not last—highly successful co-op community service day. Largely due to the hard work and infectious enthusiasm of co-op old-timer and everyday-innovator Jordan Pelot-Whitcomb, seven folks from Castro, five from Cloyne, four from Hoyt, three people from the African-American Theme House, and one person each from Wilde and Lothlorien spent their Saturday at Sobrante Park in East Oakland repairing the homes of senior citizens.

We were participating in a workday by Rebuilding Together, working side by side with other community groups, including a women in business association, an honors society, and an African-American sorority. Some of us painted a new wheelchair ramp on a senior couple’s home, while some hauled wheelbarrows of dirt for a new garden and others lifted old furniture into dumpsters and helped to carry in replacements. For Erica Mu of Hoyt, “it was neat to have the family working with us on the house.”

At lunch time we enjoyed resting in the sun, munching on the sandwiches (including a vegan option!) that Rebuilding Together had provided for us, and getting to know some of our workmates better. Then it was back to work, but work like this brought a smile to our paint-splattered faces, and not only because we were we giving back to our community. We also had the opportunity to build community both between our organization and others, and to strengthen the community amongst co-opers from different houses. For me, the best part was getting to work with co-opers from different houses that I had never met before. By the end of the day, a chorus of co-opers began chirping about how we should apply the Rebuilding Together model to our own homes, and build inter–co-op community by having Rebuilding the USCA workdays!''

The Berkeley Project
Saturday, November 11, 2006

Written by Sarah Horwitz, Wilde House
Photos courtesy of Kevin Barnum, Casa Zimbabwe

It was iffy last Saturday morning whether the weather would allow the thousand some-odd Berkeley students assembled at Sproul Plaza at 9 am to put in their best effort volunteering with the brand new Berkeley Project community service day. But, determined to pitch in, young people guarded from the rain only by thin parkas and flimsy umbrellasseparated into crews. Off they went to paint churches, refurbish elder homes, and in the case of almost forty USCA coopers, to spend the day landscaping in the community and peace garden of the long-famed and oft-neglected People's Park. For most of us, this was our first real experience in the park.

After a group-led stretching circle and introductions, community leader Terry Compost shared with us some of the incredible stories of People’s Park. I have to confess that I had felt that this narrative of resistance and counter culture renaissance was anachronistic. I had seen the park as an empty symbol. That completely changed on Saturday. By getting my own hands into the dirt of the park, I got to know it as a living entity, which offers as much potential as we choose to put into it. Attacking a neglected bed, the community garden team weeded, turned the soil, added compost, designed our beds, and finally planted. Stepping back from our work we saw garlic, onion, and lettuce patches, the ground seeming to glow with nutrients and attention. I hope to go back soon to take a peak at the beds, and I look forward to harvesting a fresh head of garlic some day!

Only by making use of this community space, did I come to feel a sense of pride in it.  Not only do I feel proud of Peoples' Park, I feel proud of my fellow co-opers, who I love more and more the more we work together.