Baking for Revolution

April 29, 2019 | revcom.us

 

From members of the Revolution Club in one area:

As the national Get Organized for an Actual Revolution Tour hit the ground in Los Angeles, in this area we worked to bring to life a fundraising idea that could broadly project the tour and the need to support it, involve people in taking this up and donating, contribute to developing networks of support, and actually raise money. We decided to do a community bake sale in a particular neighborhood, while also reaching out and involving people more broadly than that neighborhood.

First we started reaching out to all the businesses in the neighborhood and asked them if they would want to host a bake sale table, which means setting up a table inside the business during a high-traffic time where people could get information about the Revolution Tour and make donations. Then, two people who are excited about the tour and wanting to support it came to see the livestream of the LA launch and we pulled them together afterwards to make a plan. They both bake and had said this is a way they could help, so they signed up to make some baked goods. A Revolution Club member volunteered to design an image for the flyer. She created artwork, we sent it around to everyone involved to get feedback, she and another comrade worked together to make a couple changes, and soon we had a simple flyer.

Teams of two kept reaching out to businesses—talking with employees, managers, owners about the tour going around the country to meet the need of breaking through the mental shackles and organizing people for an actual revolution. We talked with them briefly about the 5 STOPS as to why we need an actual revolution—not voting or other dead-end “solutions”—and told them we have the leadership, strategy and science to make an emancipating revolution. Several expressed interest, and finally we had one location pinned down for the date we were aiming for. We did phone calling to contacts about baking and donating to support the tour, and kept reaching out to businesses. We also started thinking about other ways people could help to sell baked goods and widen out people finding out about and supporting the tour, like taking baked goods to work or getting orders from friends and relatives. We put up the flyers all over the area advertising the bake sale and the baked goods and calling on people to support the national Revolution Tour, with a couple sentences about the tour. In everything, we brought out to people what the tour is about, how it is part of working to make the revolution we need, and the needs of the revolution and the tour that they can help meet.

As it got closer to the date, we were short on bakers and some of the leaders of the project ended up doing some of the baking themselves, which wasn’t exactly what we had in mind because part of the point was to involve new people in meaningful ways to contribute. At the same time, a number of other people did also take part in the baking, some newly involved, others who are members of the Revolution Club or longtime supporters of the revolution. People recruited their family members to help out. One member of the Revolution Club recruited his two brothers to help him bake loaves of chocolate banana bread. The wife of another Revolution Club member contributed a carrot cake.

Starting in the morning, a couple people gathered the cakes and breads and cut everything into slices, priced at $3 a slice. Then we worked to bring everything together and continue reaching out to everyone we could. At a restaurant, two of us set up a table inside for about two hours. It was really cool because it was a different way for people to be introduced to and invited into the revolution. We had a display with information about the bake sale and tour and we were able to talk to a lot of the customers who were waiting for their food orders from the restaurant. There were discussions and some debates about what is the problem and solution. And we were able to talk more deeply with the restaurant owner about what the revolution is about. Several people had seen the Revolution Club around before and knew of it, but this was the first time they actually engaged with what it is about. We raised $23 there, which by itself is not that much, but was meaningful in relation to how it was raised and because it was put together with other things happening at the same time.

At another business, the owner invited us in to sell baked goods to his employees and customers. Our team there gave everyone flyers about the tour and sold something like $40 worth of baked goods. Then we connected up with a longtime supporter who lives nearby and he helped go around to businesses he knows and sell a few baked goods on the spot.

Throughout that day and the next day, people took part in the bake sale in a variety of ways. A woman who has been supportive of the revolution for a couple of years took a box full of the baked goods and sold them all to coworkers at her job. Other supporters worked out stopping by to pick up baked goods and make donations. One Revolution Club member bought baked goods to take to a social gathering he was attending, another took a box to sell to people at a family gathering. People stopped in off the street to donate or just to find out more about the revolution.

All together we raised a little over $300 for the tour. We actively involved about a dozen people who are not Revolution Club members. In most cases, this was a change in their relationship to the revolution, giving people a way to meaningfully contribute to making revolution and bringing them in on the mission of the tour. And we did this in a way that many more people got introduced to the revolution and the tour and were able to contribute to it on the spot, as well as having some impact in the neighborhood where socially and collectively people were finding out about the tour and the need to support it—including that people they know are part of doing that. This was a beginning, with the idea being to periodically do these bake sales, involving more people as we go.

Our immediate follow-up was to let the people involved know how much money we raised together and give them a sense of how people were involved in making this happen. We are now reaching out and involving some of those same people and businesses in reading and popularizing the Points of Attention for the Revolution.