[News] We Made a Village for the Kids - Reflections on the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/ 



  We Made a Village for the Kids: Reflections on the Prairie Fire
  Organizing Committee

January 26, 2017 - Mickey Ellinger 
<https://viewpointmag.com/author/mickey-ellinger/>

When I tell other activists in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area that I was a 
mem­ber of Prairie Fire Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee (PFOC or PF) in the 
1970s and 1980s,^1 
<https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#fn1-7252> 
they often say, “Oh yeah, you’re the peo­ple who always had child care 
at your events.” Peo­ple who knew us bet­ter knew that we also shared 
child care among our mem­bers and had a polit­i­cal kids group that was 
mostly our chil­dren but included a few oth­ers. Our small 
orga­ni­za­tion was a vil­lage that raised almost forty chil­dren over 
twenty years. We didn’t do a per­fect job —our grown kids are quick to 
tell us where we blew it, but also to acknowl­edge how it made their 
child­hoods richer, more mean­ing­ful, and more secure. At the same 
time, we made it pos­si­ble for par­ents to par­tic­i­pate fully in our 
col­lec­tive life and for all of the adults to have mean­ing­ful 
rela­tion­ships to chil­dren, rela­tion­ships that trans­lated our 
com­mit­ment to fem­i­nism into the prac­ti­cal work of social 
repro­duc­tion.

In this period, when pro­gres­sive activists are try­ing to fig­ure out 
how to orga­nize our­selves to deal with the chal­lenges ahead, it’s 
impor­tant to think about where chil­dren fit in. How can we nur­ture 
our com­mu­ni­ties’ chil­dren while ensur­ing that par­ents, and 
espe­cially women, are able to par­tic­i­pate fully?

For much of recorded his­tory, chil­dren have grown up in vil­lages or 
towns with tight-knit social rela­tion­ships, where every­one knew them 
and had a role in their upbring­ing. The kids knew the bound­aries, and 
expected to be sup­ported and chas­tised by every­one. The myth of the 
ide­al­ized nuclear fam­ily, two par­ents and one or two chil­dren, was 
widely prop­a­gated in United States after World War Two. My 
gen­er­a­tion, born in the 1940s and 1950s, were par­ented by that 
gen­er­a­tion of nuclear fam­ily par­ents.

My gen­er­a­tion became active sup­port­ing civil rights, oppos­ing the 
war in Viet­nam, and devel­op­ing a fem­i­nist con­scious­ness. Like 
many other rad­i­cals 
<https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/index.htm>, we orga­nized 
a small, dis­ci­plined orga­ni­za­tion of a type that flour­ished in the 
1970s but is rare on the Left today. We con­sid­ered our­selves 
com­mu­nists, an orga­ni­za­tion of ded­i­cated cadre for whom 
over­throw­ing the US empire was our high­est pri­or­ity. We stud­ied 
the Marx­ist, Lenin­ist and Maoist clas­sics, but were not aligned with 
any for­mal com­mu­nist ten­dency, and looked to nei­ther the Soviet 
Union nor China for direc­tion. Most of us were mem­bers of Bay Area 
pub­lic activist move­ments. Some ended up in prison for our actions and 
beliefs, and oth­ers were under­ground for years.

We were united by an anti-impe­ri­al­ist pol­i­tics that saw white 
supremacy as foun­da­tional to the U.S empire, shared the rudi­ments of 
a strat­egy for over­throw­ing U.S. impe­ri­al­ism, and adhered to a 
high level of col­lec­tive account­abil­ity in our per­sonal lives that 
included a com­mit­ment to rais­ing our chil­dren.

We hated how the nuclear fam­ily fore­closed women’s oppor­tu­ni­ties, 
and when we founded PFOC we wanted to do it dif­fer­ently. It was the 
1970s. We were mostly in our 30s and had ded­i­cated our lives to 
over­throw­ing the U.S. empire, but we also intended to raise 
fam­i­lies. We were mostly first gen­er­a­tion home­grown rad­i­cals and 
some Red dia­per babies, look­ing for new ways to live in the world. As 
one of our mem­bers explains:

    We didn’t want to repli­cate the expe­ri­ence of the Com­mu­nist
    Party, where women were either com­pletely over­bur­dened or they
    were never around and the chil­dren felt aban­doned. There are many
    chil­dren of the Com­mu­nist Party who felt that their par­ents were
    lunatics, or women who felt like they couldn’t par­tic­i­pate in
    polit­i­cal activ­i­ties, because, of course, it was their job to
    take care of the chil­dren.

Women’s lib­er­a­tion was cen­tral to our pol­i­tics. We were led by 
women and saw fight­ing male supremacy as essen­tial to over­throw­ing 
impe­ri­al­ism. We wrote these ideas into our found­ing polit­i­cal 
state­ment in 1977 
<http://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC501_scans/Break/501.break.1.march.77.pdf>:

    Under impe­ri­al­ism, women’s oppres­sion has become defined within
    the frame­work of their dou­ble func­tion: as unwaged repro­duc­ers,
    social­iz­ers and main­tain­ers of the labor force in the home; and
    as super exploited mem­bers of the wage labor force, pri­mar­ily in
    the reserve army of labor. These oppres­sive func­tions are
    main­tained and rein­forced by male suprema­cist insti­tu­tions,
    ide­ol­ogy and priv­i­lege which extend into every area of women’s
    lives: polit­i­cal, social, cul­tural, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and
    sex­ual (p. 29).

Our women’s cau­cus was both a polit­i­cal and a per­sonal sup­port. We 
sup­ported gay lib­er­a­tion when much of the left con­sid­ered being 
gay a dis­ease of empire. We always sup­ported, argued with, and 
par­tic­i­pated in the autonomous women’s move­ment. Fur­ther, we were 
deter­mined to prac­tice fem­i­nism in the daily life of our 
orga­ni­za­tion. Par­ents, espe­cially women, were full par­tic­i­pants 
in our collective’s very demand­ing array of tasks and 
activ­i­ties. Col­lec­tive child care was a prac­ti­cal expres­sion of 
our fem­i­nist pol­i­tics and a polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity, as 
impor­tant as par­tic­i­pa­tion in our stren­u­ous sched­ule of 
meet­ings and actions.

Our col­lec­tive child care was more than a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, and 
more than just a belief that “the chil­dren are our future.” We saw 
social repro­duc­tion, “women’s work,” as the work that knits human 
com­mu­ni­ties together. We wanted all of our mem­bers to par­tic­i­pate 
in work that we saw as cru­cial to build­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary 
con­scious­ness and mak­ing rev­o­lu­tion.

As a new gen­er­a­tion of activists is wrestling with ques­tions of 
orga­ni­za­tion and strat­egy, I would argue that we need to look at how 
to build our move­ments to pre­fig­ure the world we want to see while we 
are fight­ing for racial jus­tice, immi­grant rights, women’s 
lib­er­a­tion and the rights of gen­der non-con­form­ing peo­ple. This 
essay describes what we did in PFOC in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area and 
reflects on its rel­e­vance to today.


    Child Care Teams

Child care teams were orga­nized for every fam­ily, and every mem­ber of 
PFOC par­tic­i­pated. Our prac­tice evolved over the two decades of our 
orga­ni­za­tional exis­tence, but the basics stayed pretty much the 
same. A child care shift, usu­ally weekly, could involve pick­ing up one 
or more kids from school or after school activ­ity, help­ing with 
home­work, mak­ing din­ner, over­see­ing bath and bed­time. The teams 
usu­ally had from three to five mem­bers depend­ing on the adult/child 
ratio at the time, which meant that par­ents were free three to five 
times a week to go to meet­ings or other activ­i­ties of our lives. We 
helped man­age week­end activ­i­ties; when we had pro­grams or 
activ­i­ties we always pro­vided child care, not only for our­selves but 
for any­one who par­tic­i­pated.

The child­care teams were our effort to cre­ate a vil­lage for the kids. 
When I picked up my charge from school or day camp I would joke that I 
was part of her “vast entourage.” We wanted the kids to know that they 
had peo­ple they could call on, talk to, ask for help. The tes­ti­mony 
of the grown chil­dren con­firms that most of them felt that sup­port, 
felt wel­come in the world. They crit­i­cize us for our short­com­ings, 
but also rec­og­nize that they had more sup­port than most of their 
peers. They are a pretty con­fi­dent, com­pe­tent bunch, most have warm 
rela­tion­ships with their par­ents and have kept friend­ships with many 
mem­bers of their child care teams for more than 30 years.

For the twenty years PFOC was part of the Bay Area Left, about fifty of 
us raised almost forty kids. Today the old­est are approach­ing fifty, 
the youngest are not yet in their teens. We have a hand­ful of 
grand­chil­dren, and in a lot of ways resem­ble any other crew of aging 
white rad­i­cals. Many of us are teach­ers, writ­ers, and still 
activists. We still par­tic­i­pate in sol­i­dar­ity work with Haiti and 
Palestine, march with Black Lives Mat­ter against police ter­ror and for 
women’s repro­duc­tive jus­tice and LGBTQ lib­er­a­tion.

As a par­tic­i­pant in today’s move­ments, I see that par­ents, 
espe­cially women, are fac­ing the same obsta­cles to full 
par­tic­i­pa­tion that we saw in the 1970s. Left groups do not have a 
per­spec­tive that includes child rais­ing.

Although I was con­vinced that our efforts at struc­tured col­lec­tive 
child rais­ing were pos­i­tive, I wanted to find out what all of us, 
adults and chil­dren, thought of our child care prac­tice. How did the 
kids under­stand what we were doing? How do the adults remem­ber their 
years of par­ent­ing in a col­lec­tive or being on child care teams? I 
inter­viewed every­one I could find who was will­ing to talk to me for 
an hour, about fifty inter­views in all. There were a few adults who I 
could not track down, and a few who declined to be inter­viewed. I was 
able to inter­view most of the grown chil­dren. This infor­mal style of 
inquiry raised three themes to which peo­ple kept return­ing: the kids 
mostly liked their child care teams and hated it when peo­ple left them; 
the par­ents appre­ci­ated the help, although were often ambiva­lent 
about shar­ing deci­sion mak­ing about the kids; and the non-par­ents 
were per­son­ally trans­formed by build­ing rela­tion­ships with 
chil­dren.^2 
<https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#fn2-7252> 



    Impact on the Children

The kids mostly loved the child care teams, although they were less 
thrilled with how many grownups felt enti­tled to know what they were 
doing and to have opin­ions about it. From one of our older chil­dren, 
the third of four raised in a big col­lec­tive house in San Francisco’s 
Haight Ash­bury:

    One of the great things about hav­ing a child care team was for kids
    to hang out with adults that are going to expose them to things and
    talk about things with them and take them on adven­tures and have
    energy for them that their bio­log­i­cal par­ents might not. Being
    around adults who said I have energy for you and I have time for you
    and I want to focus on you and take you places and hang out with you.

Most of the for­mer kids I inter­viewed con­curred, remem­ber­ing 
par­tic­u­lar mem­bers of their team who they enjoyed. For exam­ple, 
another grown child shared:

    Annie would tell these epic sto­ries about the Roman bour­geoisie
    who were glut­to­nous and would go into the vom­i­to­ri­ums and
    throw up so they could eat more. And then the maids had to go in and
    clean up these hor­ri­ble vom­i­to­ri­ums and found these pre­cious
    jew­els and ran away and lived forever on these rings. Really
    cre­ative won­der­ful sto­ries that were very polit­i­cal that I
    just ate up.

Of course there was a down­side to hav­ing so much adult atten­tion. The 
same per­son con­tin­ues:

    A lot of peo­ple talk­ing about how you did on your math test and
    whether you can tie your shoes or the age you were potty trained, it
    puts a lot of pres­sure on you. The level of aware­ness of other
    people’s opin­ions about me from a very early age. I’m a very
    pri­vate per­son because I’m very aware of other people’s opin­ions
    and crit­i­cisms and judg­ment. I really keep things very close. I
    don’t expose myself very read­ily. Pri­vacy that I’ve clung to as
    secu­rity.

On the other hand, they hated it when peo­ple went away. As adults the 
kids mostly praise us for our efforts to sup­port them. But they all 
have mem­o­ries of loss, of peo­ple leav­ing the child care teams, some 
of them of peo­ple going under­ground. They hated peo­ple going away and 
hold us account­able for not find­ing a way to help them under­stand 
what was going on. When some­one left our tight-knit polit­i­cal 
cir­cle, they often left the kids as well:

    We lost [one per­son] because he left the com­mu­nity. I remem­ber
    ask­ing about it. I remem­ber my mom say­ing he’s not going to be a
    part of PFOC any more and her say­ing he wanted to be more with the
    gay com­mu­nity. Some part of me got that, but I asked if he was
    going to be around for us. And she said yes, but I don’t think he
    was very wel­come in the scene any more.

But the kids knew they had some­thing spe­cial. Our kids knew the teams 
were an asset their friends did not have. Even when they did not know 
how to say it, they could tell that their con­nec­tions ran far­ther and 
deeper than a “tra­di­tional” two par­ent house­hold and that their team 
were not babysit­ters. More than one of the kids noted that it was their 
friends of color who rec­og­nized our extended fam­ily style arrange­ments:

    I grew up with a lot of black kids, and this way of hav­ing fam­ily
    wasn’t that dis­sim­i­lar from the way that their fam­i­lies were.
    The peo­ple I felt most uncom­fort­able with were other white kids,
    because there was still such a pres­sure for het­ero fam­i­lies. But
    the black kids I hung out with would say, oh this is my play cousin.
    And I could say I have some of those too. It was a lan­guage for me
    to express what you all were. I remem­ber beg­ging my par­ents,
    ‘what are these peo­ple to me because they are not just my friends?’
    I couldn’t use the word com­rade, but that was another way to say
    it. That was my play sis­ter.

The part­ner of a woman close to us inter­viewed some PFOC par­ents and 
chil­dren for her master’s the­sis in social work. She sum­ma­rizes:

    The kids I inter­viewed had a sense of being wel­come in the world.
    Their con­fi­dence arose from their sense of being wel­come in
    mul­ti­ple house­holds. They had a sense that by and large they were
    raised by peo­ple who lis­tened to them, that were in their
    busi­ness. Some kids didn’t like that there was a lack of pri­vacy
    at times, but they also learned how to speak their minds with adults
    at a young age because they had to. And there was actu­ally sup­port
    for them speak­ing out. The folks who raised them were rather
    remark­able peo­ple in them­selves, and I think that some of that
    rubbed off.


    Children’s Political Education

We orga­nized polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion for our grow­ing pack of 
school-age chil­dren. They called it the Red Drag­ons. We showed them 
movies like Roots and Eyes on the Prize. The kids dis­rupted Toys R Us 
dur­ing the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son with a demon­stra­tion against 
war toys. Red Drag­ons was our effort to engage the kids in our 
polit­i­cal work, led by PFOC mem­bers who worked in child care cen­ters 
or the pub­lic schools. When we look back on it now, I think many of us 
agree that we were pretty top down and dog­matic, and that if we had it 
to do over again we would have lis­tened harder to the kids.

Our most suc­cess­ful cam­paign with them was Pen­nies for Pen­cils. 
Peo­ple had just returned from a del­e­ga­tion to El Sal­vador in 1984 
and told the kids how poorly equipped the schools were, men­tion­ing 
that the kids there didn’t even have pen­cils. Our kids responded: “We 
brain­stormed what we would want to give the kids in El Sal­vador, and 
we prob­a­bly got help with that. Some­body helped us learn about the 
lack of school sup­plies … I remem­ber being really excited about that.” 
We mounted a cam­paign with the idea of col­lect­ing money for pen­cils. 
They had a booth at neigh­bor­hood fairs (pin the tail on Rea­gan) and 
can­vassed door to door. The kids raised more than $1,500 in three years 
and sent tens of thou­sands of pen­cils to El Sal­vador.

The reac­tions of the grown chil­dren to their mem­o­ries of the Red 
Drag­ons ran the gamut from neg­a­tive to pos­i­tive, with polite 
ambiva­lence a com­mon response.

The most neg­a­tive:

    I do under­stand the parental com­pul­sion to give chil­dren a
    world­view that incor­po­rates one’s own val­ues, and you guys had
    solid ones, for the most part. I just don’t think most of the adults
    involved knew how to han­dle the respon­si­bil­ity in a way that was
    con­ducive to a child’s under­stand­ing and devel­op­ment.

Other assess­ments were more ambiva­lent:

    No one on my child care team was part of Red Drag­ons, so nobody was
    invested in my emo­tional well-being except to make sure I came home
    with all my teeth and wasn’t hauled off to juve­nile hall. I don’t
    blame them. We were thrown together in ways that weren’t very
    organic. I have really fond mem­o­ries of play­ing with all of these
    kids; we have some great pic­tures of all of us. But as we got older
    it got a lit­tle meaner. And as we per­ceived the larger social
    set­ting we were in, we also reflected the social struc­ture of the
    orga­ni­za­tion and of our par­ents. It wasn’t that we were friends
    and had a play date. It was that our par­ents were doing polit­i­cal
    work, and we were doing polit­i­cal work.

The most pos­i­tive assess­ment of our kids group came from peo­ple who 
them­selves became orga­niz­ers as adults:

    I loved the Red Drag­ons. I remem­ber a lot of kids. Me and [my
    sis­ter] would tease each other, oh boy are they really train­ing us
    for some­thing, indoc­tri­na­tion, con­trary to what our par­ents
    might say now. I loved being around all these kids, I felt like we
    were a fam­ily, we were learn­ing some­thing in a pretty fun way. We
    went on camp­ing trips, we did all this pretty cool stuff.

    We learned really impor­tant things about race and gen­der in the
    Red Drag­ons, and about what it meant. We didn’t have to unlearn the
    myths about the per­fect U.S. democ­racy later on.

We vis­ited polit­i­cal pris­on­ers on a reg­u­lar basis and took the 
kids as a mat­ter of course. We were close to a cohort of Puerto Rican, 
Black and white polit­i­cal pris­on­ers: mil­i­tant activists for Puerto 
Rican inde­pen­dence, Black nation­al­ist rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, white 
anti-impe­ri­al­ists con­victed of armed actions. As I inter­viewed our 
kids, I real­ized that with­out my ask­ing they were all telling me 
about going to visit polit­i­cal pris­on­ers and how impor­tant those 
vis­its were for teach­ing them about injus­tice:

    Vis­it­ing pris­ons and vis­it­ing the peo­ple that I knew in prison
    were prob­a­bly some of the most pow­er­ful expe­ri­ences I had when
    I was a kid. It made me really angry because they couldn’t walk out
    with us at the end.

    I think kids really want to fig­ure out what’s fair or not, and it
    didn’t seem fair that these peo­ple who were so amaz­ing and who
    either did noth­ing or did some­thing that I thought was jus­ti­fied
    were in prison for the rest of their lives instead of out with us.

Talk­ing to the grown kids con­vinced me that our child care prac­tice 
gave them an over­all under­stand­ing of social jus­tice and 
con­fi­dence in their capac­ity to par­tic­i­pate in social change. None 
of them has wholly rejected our polit­i­cal per­spec­tives, although 
they are not all activists or orga­niz­ers by any means. And as they 
have their own chil­dren, they echo some of our child care 
arrange­ments, although they tend to be struc­tured along more 
tra­di­tional lines (call­ing on us as grand­par­ents, etc.).


    Impact on the Parents

The par­ents were of course glad to have the sup­port of child care 
teams. Some felt they didn’t get enough sup­port, espe­cially the ones 
who had chil­dren later when we had more kids to take care of and were 
less tightly orga­nized. And some admit­ted to wish­ing they could spend 
more time with their chil­dren and resent­ing the chil­dren hav­ing 
other sig­nif­i­cant adults. As one par­ent put it, “I wanted those 
lit­tle arms reach­ing out for me.” Every­one talked about the 
chal­lenge of find­ing a bal­ance between col­lec­tive dis­cus­sion of 
the kids and the need to make final par­ent­ing deci­sions.

A long time mem­ber, a child care pro­fes­sional, sums up:

    I knew that in the long run most of those par­ents were going to be
    with those kids, but that many of the peo­ple on the child care team
    were there for this year or that year, as long as their assign­ment
    lasted and as long as they were involved with Prairie Fire.

    It’s what I under­stand about my role as a pro­fes­sional child care
    provider. I can be with kids 40 hours a week, but I’m going to be
    with them for a cou­ple of years. It’s their par­ents who are going
    to be with them for the long term.

On the other hand, our child care teams were an oppor­tu­nity for both 
par­ents and chil­dren to have a broader view of the value of 
rela­tion­ships between adults and chil­dren. One of the par­ents 
explained it this way:

    I became a par­ent kick­ing and scream­ing. But then I got to the
    point where I didn’t want our daugh­ter to go to another house, I
    didn’t want her to go for two weeks to Maine with peo­ple on her
    child care team. I wanted to be with her. But that wasn’t what
    peo­ple signed up for. If I wanted this to be a child care team, I
    had to give up my priv­i­lege or my power or my posi­tion as
    pri­mary par­ent. Let­ting go of that was hard, it wasn’t some­thing
    I wanted to do, but I knew it was what was best for her.

These unique famil­ial units had other unin­tended effects. For 
instance, they mit­i­gated the pain for the kids when par­ents 
sep­a­rated. Because we tended to cou­ple within the col­lec­tive, our 
kids did not usu­ally lose a par­ent when the par­ents sep­a­rated. 
(Col­lec­tive sup­port and pres­sure for the grownups was also a 
fac­tor; our breakups were for the most part very civil.) If any­thing, 
the child care teams grew and changed as the kids rotated between 
houses. But to a remark­able extent, the secu­rity of our chil­dren was 
not depen­dent on the per­sonal rela­tion­ships of their par­ents.

One of our for­mer mem­bers:

    The child care team was an invalu­able asset in man­ag­ing divorce.
    Not just because we saw other peo­ple break up and still have this
    fam­ily struc­ture, although that’s a big thing that I got out of
    the whole thing, but also because you need help some­times. My
    breakup with [my part­ner] was in part a pro­duct of some of the
    dys­func­tions within Prairie Fire. But in the same way that a
    col­lec­tive struc­ture put a lot of pres­sure on a fam­ily, the
    sense that we were a fam­ily even if we weren’t together was never
    ques­tioned for us because we had this struc­ture.

And one of the grown chil­dren:

    I def­i­nitely noticed that my par­ents get­ting along bet­ter after
    they were sep­a­rated was very ben­e­fi­cial and that was the most
    impor­tant thing. They seemed to get along bet­ter after they were
    sep­a­rated than when they were together. I remem­ber as a young
    child, 7 or 8, other friends say­ing I was rich because I had two
    houses, espe­cially since they were liv­ing so close to each other.

Col­lec­tive child care posed chal­lenges for the par­ents, as peo­ple 
not bio­log­i­cally related to their chil­dren formed rela­tion­ships 
with them and had opin­ions about them. We did not have clear 
guide­li­nes, so one team might decide it was appro­pri­ate to argue 
about what mid­dle school a 12 year old should attend, while on another 
team, the par­ents might be com­pletely in charge, with the rest of us 
viewed as helpers. At a min­i­mum we relieved our par­ents of the 
bur­den of being the only adult mod­els for their chil­dren; some 
par­ents actu­ally con­structed fam­i­lies of a new type with 
non-par­ents, fam­i­lies that have lasted to this day.


    Impact on the Non-Parents

The most sur­pris­ing trans­for­ma­tive impact of our child care 
prac­tice was for the non-par­ents. For me, as for many of the 
non-par­ents, col­lec­tive child care not only deep­ened my fem­i­nist 
pol­i­tics, it changed my life. I come from a big fam­ily, saw my mother 
give up her per­sonal ambi­tions to raise us, and was unwill­ing to be 
some child’s only or even pri­mary role model of moth­er­hood. Nor was I 
inter­ested in becom­ing a preschool or ele­men­tary school teacher. But 
I like kids, care about them, and knew that rais­ing chil­dren was 
vitally impor­tant work in the world. I did child­care for sev­eral of 
our older kids, and became a third par­ent for our daugh­ter, who I have 
known since she was con­ceived almost 40 years ago.

Early in the inter­view­ing process for this project, I real­ized that 
many of us non-par­ents had our own ver­sions of my trans­for­ma­tive 
expe­ri­ences. Some of us made new fam­i­lies that included the 
non-par­ents (at least three such fam­i­lies). Oth­ers went from the 
child­care teams to bear or adopt their own chil­dren: a dozen 
het­ero­sex­ual cou­ples, and half a dozen les­bian cou­ples in and 
around PFOC. Two sin­gle men, on straight, one gay, and one woman adopted.

One man, now a par­ent of two chil­dren, describes his trans­for­ma­tive 
expe­ri­ence:

    When I took the step of join­ing PF I knew this would be part of my
    duties, and I saw it as a duty. …It takes about half a sec­ond
    before you real­ize this isn’t a duty, it’s about devel­op­ing a
    rela­tion­ship with this kid, with chil­dren. Once that shift
    hap­pened, it’s mag­i­cal. Once you make that shift and you’re
    really relat­ing to a kid, then you can relate to any kid…you can
    become a teacher!

    Where’s the pay­back [for us]? PF’s not around any more, I have
    these two young chil­dren, but really the pay­back, the reward was
    intrin­sic, at the moment.

A gay man who became a par­ent as well as a leader of the Red Drag­ons 
offers this:

    It didn’t occur to me to have a rela­tion­ship to chil­dren, because
    one of the things about being a gay man is that you didn’t have a
    rela­tion­ship to chil­dren…. One of the great things that Prairie
    Fire’s col­lec­tive child care and the Red Drag­ons gave me was the
    knowl­edge that I loved kids. I didn’t know that because that wasn’t
    a think­able thing before.

He attrib­uted his own even­tual adop­tion of a daugh­ter to his time 
with kids in the PFOC:

    I highly doubt that it would have hap­pened if I had not had the
    expe­ri­ence I had with kids in PF and learned, a. I liked it, and
    b. I could do it. …A lot of peo­ple I knew were dying. A whole set
    of gay men that I had come to find myself with were dying. And in
    that way that death and new chil­dren are part of a cycle….

A straight man who went on to be one of the three par­ents of our 
daugh­ter explains:

    I had zero expe­ri­ence of kids before PF… had no inter­est in being
    around kids and no expe­ri­ence rais­ing or help­ing with that.…One
    of our agree­ments [in my rela­tion­ship] was that we weren’t going
    to have kids, because I didn’t want to have kids. She agreed
    polit­i­cally but not personally…I couldn’t say no, but my
    con­di­tion was that we were going to live col­lec­tively. I don’t
    think I would have wanted to have kids in a dif­fer­ent con­text at
    that time. Hav­ing the col­lec­tiv­ity allowed me to be open to that
    possibility…It wasn’t just the polit­i­cal line, the project, we all
    do child care.

    It wasn’t just open­ing up time for women to be out in the
    polit­i­cal world because they didn’t have to be with the kids all
    the time. It also allowed me to not be tak­ing such a per­sonal risk
    to the rest of my life goals.

Our child care model worked because we were ded­i­cated to a larger 
polit­i­cal goal and child­care was a con­di­tion of mem­ber­ship. Many 
of us were not our­selves par­ents, and we sub­scribed to a fem­i­nist 
pol­i­tics that defined col­lec­tive child rais­ing as essen­tial 
fem­i­nist prac­tice. Our model became a chal­lenge as more of us 
decided to become par­ents and there were fewer non-par­ents to 
pop­u­late the teams. Our later par­ent­ing mod­els look more like 
today’s par­ent co-ops and play dates. By the mid-90s our 
orga­ni­za­tion had failed to grow; we dis­banded in the Bay Area.

Yet some of the next gen­er­a­tion of par­ents in the Bay Area rad­i­cal 
move­ment were directly inspired by our model to con­struct some­thing 
sim­i­lar involv­ing sup­port for the par­ents and a big­ger cir­cle of 
adults for the kids. An envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice orga­nizer in her 40s 
told me how her obser­va­tion of the PFOC child­care teams influ­enced 
her to try the model:

    We lived with some­one on a PFOC child care team. The child spent
    the night at our house once a week and we got to know the whole
    extended fam­ily, her mom and all of them. They intro­duced us to
    the Prairie Fire model of the child care team, so we had a lit­tle
    gath­er­ing of folks who were inter­ested in this idea. Some of the
    Prairie Fire folks told sto­ries about what it was, what they did
    and how it worked. Then we started a child care team for our
    first child.

    We had a fairly big crew in the begin­ning, that whit­tled down to
    four or five. Many of them have stayed really close in our lives.
    They would take her out for walks, or come over and spend time with
    her. That would give us time; it was a foun­da­tion for us. And also
    for her. It was a way to provide her with other adults.

Another cou­ple that had been part of one of our teams orga­nized a team 
of their own when their child was born, and impro­vised some other 
col­lec­tive child­care ideas on that basis:

    When the baby was born we didn’t cook for a month. Peo­ple would
    come over, hold her, do our dishes. It was about peo­ple com­ing
    over and being help­ful, but also hav­ing a rela­tion­ship.

    It started with orga­nized child care, and as she’s got­ten older
    it’s trans­muted into a large fam­ily. She’s got a lot of aun­ties
    and an uncle. Some of them don’t see her as much but they’re still
    her aun­ties and uncle. They will take her and a friend and go do
    stuff with them, so that they have become part of her fam­ily.

    The other thing that we did was … [at her preschool] she became
    friends with these girls and we became friends with their
    fam­i­lies. We have sup­ported these girls since they were two years
    old to con­tinue their friend­ship and to con­tinue our
    rela­tion­ship with these fam­i­lies. We helped one fam­ily when her
    dad died. The girls go to dif­fer­ent schools but they see each
    other every sum­mer. They have birth­day par­ties together.

    I recruited the fam­i­lies to start a coop­er­a­tive day camp. Since
    kinder­garten we have spent one to three weeks each sum­mer tak­ing
    turns hav­ing a day with the kids in a model that’s not so
    fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent than a child care team.

Still, for most activists, the deci­sion to become par­ents tends to 
drive them out of the move­ment. And yet, these par­ents are pre­cisely 
the ones who come to under­stand the need for new ways of think­ing 
about child­care. A vet­eran activist in her 40s with a teenage 
daugh­ter sums up the dilemma:

    We all pay lip ser­vice to the impor­tance of the next
    gen­er­a­tion, the impor­tance of edu­ca­tion, safety for chil­dren,
    blah blah blah. But it’s not until we our­selves become par­ents
    that we actu­ally start to want to do things about it, but then
    because it’s just us, we are peeled away from the main­stream of the
    move­ment and have to fig­ure it out on our own. And that hap­pens
    over and over again. It was prob­a­bly hap­pen­ing in your
    gen­er­a­tion, it’s hap­pen­ing with peo­ple younger than me.

    And because we each decide to have a child when we decide, the
    peo­ple who become acutely aware of the need to change how we raise
    chil­dren are the peo­ple who do not have the capac­ity to make that
    change hap­pen.

A cre­ative adap­ta­tion of the team approach was a child care 
col­lec­tive that flour­ished in the Bay Area in the early 2000s, 
orga­nized by a group of white activists look­ing for a way to do 
con­crete sol­i­dar­ity work with orga­ni­za­tions led by women of 
color. Its mem­bers built rela­tion­ships with par­tic­u­lar 
orga­ni­za­tions, pro­vid­ing child care for their meet­ings and 
activ­i­ties. I inter­viewed one of their orga­niz­ers:

    One of the pri­mary goals of the child­care col­lec­tive is to
    provide sup­port for work­ing class women of color lead­ers in the
    move­ment through orga­ni­za­tions like Peo­ple Orga­nized to Win
    Employ­ment Rights (POWER), Causa Justa/Just Cause, the women’s
    pro­grams of the Day Labor Cen­ter, and sim­i­lar orga­ni­za­tions
    that have their base in work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties of color.

    Child­care is a way that peo­ple with dif­fer­ent forms of
    priv­i­lege around race or class or gen­der could be act­ing in
    sol­i­dar­ity with com­mu­ni­ties that are most impacted by
    het­eropa­tri­archy and cap­i­tal­ism and as a way to sup­port
    fam­i­lies more broadly to come into move­ment spaces, and to
    sup­port women’s lead­er­ship in par­tic­u­lar.

Still, this par­tic­u­lar child­care col­lec­tive is an excep­tion 
within the broader move­ment land­scape:

    The flip side is that there is still a lack of com­mit­ment to
    child­care in the left and in our move­ment. Even some of the women
    that we would be work­ing with would have to strug­gle within their
    orga­ni­za­tions to get resources for child care.

    Child care is the first thing that peo­ple cut out of their
    sched­ule when they get “too busy,” and you would have a lot of
    con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple about well, you’re not too busy, it’s
    a mat­ter of pri­or­i­ties. You’re mak­ing a polit­i­cal deci­sion
    to depri­or­i­tize it. Once a month? Almost any­body can do that.
    But it has to be a pri­or­ity. And why is this not a pri­or­ity?

Like many of the orig­i­nal PFOC activists I inter­viewed, this 
orga­nizer empha­sized how this sort of child­care work con­tributed to 
the strength of the strug­gle in the long term:

    It was not just about sol­i­dar­ity work. It was about build­ing
    with these young peo­ple. I got to work with young peo­ple over the
    course of many years and then see them grow up and turn into youth
    orga­niz­ers. I learned a lot around how impor­tant it is not just
    to sup­port women’s lead­er­ship but to cre­ate spaces where entire
    fam­i­lies can be a part of move­ment work in dif­fer­ent ways.


    Building a Broader Movement

If we want to build move­ments that are broad as well as deep, and that 
reflect our com­mu­ni­ties, we have to provide for our chil­dren in deep 
and mean­ing­ful ways.

Par­ents feel tremen­dous respon­si­bil­ity for chil­dren, and will not 
lightly entrust them to a col­lec­tive process of any kind unless they 
are con­fi­dent that the chil­dren will be safe, nur­tured, 
appre­ci­ated. This means dif­fer­ent things in dif­fer­ent 
com­mu­ni­ties, but includes safety from the police, know­ing about food 
allergies and other health sit­u­a­tions, and appre­ci­at­ing each 
child’s unique mind and spirit. A sense of humor and will­ing­ness to 
learn are a basic require­ment.

What insti­tu­tions can inspire this level of trust? First, there must 
be com­mon goals besides care for the chil­dren, some kind of 
col­lec­tive inten­tion to which peo­ple feel and are held account­able. 
That is nec­es­sary, but not suf­fi­cient. Many rad­i­cal 
orga­ni­za­tions in the 1970s and 1980s had com­mon goals (the usual 
lan­guage was “prin­ci­ples of unity”), but most did lit­tle or noth­ing 
to deal with child rais­ing as either a prac­ti­cal or a polit­i­cal 
prob­lem.

The lesson we take from our expe­ri­ence in PFOC is that the 
col­lec­tive inten­tion must be fem­i­nist and focused on com­mu­nity 
build­ing as well as nar­rowly “polit­i­cal.” Com­mu­nity build­ing 
involves a lot of tak­ing care of each other and a lot of mun­dane work: 
help­ing with each other’s liv­ing con­di­tions, deal­ing with unequal 
incomes, accom­mo­dat­ing dis­abil­ity. It’s a lot of the work that has 
tra­di­tion­ally been “women’s work,” and it needs to be the work of 
every­one in the com­mu­nity if we are going to be prac­tic­ing 
fem­i­nists— which is another way of say­ing car­ing human beings. If 
our polit­i­cal work makes us “too busy” to build our com­mu­nity, we 
can be sure that tak­ing care of the chil­dren will be seen merely as 
one task among oth­ers, and that peo­ple who are not par­ents will find 
them­selves “too busy” to ful­fill their child care 
respon­si­bil­i­ties. Yet if we see the direct link between build­ing 
strong com­mu­ni­ties and our broader polit­i­cal goals, we can 
appre­ci­ate the impor­tance of col­lec­tive child­care.

If the col­lec­tive is com­mit­ted to the kids, then par­ents face the 
oppor­tu­nity to let other adults into the lives of their chil­dren. 
Some will wel­come this; for some it will be a chal­lenge. Cur­rent 
“attach­ment par­ent­ing” ide­ol­ogy rein­forces par­ents’ 
under­stand­able anx­i­ety about their chil­dren and dove­tails with the 
per­va­sive cli­mate of fear fos­tered by our increas­ingly 
militarized/policed soci­ety and its media min­ions. Par­ents may not 
real­ize or pri­or­i­tize how much shared child rais­ing means for the 
adult non-par­ents. The fem­i­nist pol­i­tics of the col­lec­tive 
neces­si­tates dis­cus­sion of how much non-par­ents and par­ents and 
their chil­dren can gain from the sup­port of a big­ger com­mu­nity.

And then non-par­ent adults have to sign on and step up, to see 
our­selves not as “help­ing the par­ents” (echo of men “help­ing with 
house­work”) but as estab­lish­ing seri­ous rela­tion­ships with 
par­ents and chil­dren, for our­selves as well as for them.

Our col­lec­tive com­mit­ment to our chil­dren in PFOC has made us all, 
women and men, gay and straight, much more con­scious of the impor­tance 
of the work of social repro­duc­tion and the value of com­mu­nity. We 
strive for egal­i­tar­ian rela­tion­ships in our fam­i­lies. We have a 
web of com­radely rela­tion­ships with each other based on mutual 
respect. We are car­ing for grand­chil­dren and help­ing each other with 
the hard­ships of aging; we do child care as sol­i­dar­ity work with 
other orga­ni­za­tions; and we see our­selves as part of the project of 
envi­sion­ing a world worth liv­ing in.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 1.

    After the then-popular quotation from Mao Zedong, “A single spark
    can start a prairie fire.” ↩
    <https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#rf1-7252>

 2.

    Although I talked to many former members of PFOC and our children,
    this is my personal summary and not a collective assessment. ↩
    <https://viewpointmag.com/2017/01/26/we-made-a-village-for-the-kids-reflections-on-the-prairie-fire-organizing-committee/#rf2-7252>

Mickey Ellinger <https://viewpointmag.com/author/mickey-ellinger/> is an 
activist in Oakland, California. She has taught college classes and 
worked in a print shop, as a system administrator, and a freelance writer.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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