Maxwell Park Frick Seminary

by admin | Apr 6, 2021 | Interview with Changemakers, Resilience Hubs

Don’t let anybody tell you that they know how this is going to end: The Maxwell Park Frick Seminary 

Climate change is a global problem, but Laura Nicodemus is stepping up to be a part of a local solution. In this interview, Nicodemus talks about starting resilience hubs in her own neighborhood, and how one person can make a difference. 

Tell us about your resilience hub team.

Our team actually is just me and my husband. We’re going to be pulling in other people in. We live in Maxwell Park in Oakland. We’re really starting from scratch, I have a lot of neighborhood organizing skills and we’ve lived in our neighborhood for seventeen years. In terms of getting a resilience hub going, we’re at the beginning. It’s a little daunting, so part of the challenge is… getting used to dealing with the challenge. 

So, why did you want to start a resilience hub? 

Because it made sense to us to be a part of something that had more aspects to it than just disaster preparation. Personally, I think a lot of people lead really isolated lives. We need to be connecting more and depending on each other and helping each other out. This is a really good way of doing that. Also, it just makes sense to put different aspects of resilience altogether. In terms of disaster preparation, it’s a good excuse for us to get our acts together. Something that just occurred to me this morning was like, setting up a disaster prep buddy system. I’m sure people are already doing this, but it’d be a program where there’s someone you’re checking in to stay accountable. That seems like a good, tangible way to get started. For us, one of the challenges is that there isn’t a clear space we can have. 

You talked about disaster preparation. What kind of disasters do you see affecting your neighborhood specifically? 

Well, certainly an earthquake. But also just living through fires and the smoke. For people who can’t go out, I’m thinking that the fire season and this level of smoke threat is going to become unfortunately pretty regular. We need to be ready to help each other out. And there’s the pandemic. That’s another disaster. My fantasy would be if we could set up a general neighborhood helping system, so that if there’s an elderly person who needs help, then that could be a part of it. I live on the border of two neighborhoods, one is Maxwell Park, and it’s more affluent and more, as far as I’m aware, more organized. And then the other neighborhood has people who are struggling with a lot of day-to-day stuff. As I’m talking to you, I’m realizing that before I make any conclusions, I need to find out more about that other neighborhood. I want to avoid coming in as a white person with the solutions. I’m going to try to avoid that. 

You’ve talked a lot about you and your husband taking the initiative to combat really global threats, like the pandemic or climate change. Do you think a lot of other people are waking up to create local solutions to global problems? 

That’s a good question, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I actually have a theory about that. It’s a dialectic, a yin-yang thing, and it’s pretty simple. Basically, there’s these huge problems like global warming and climate change and pandemics and they’re really overwhelming, right? People spend a lot of time thinking about ‘Can we save the world? Can we stop this? Oh my god, what if we can’t?’ I think we need a more constructive way to deal with problems. I see it as a dialectic where there are threats where people just need help. People need aid. So, if you want to build people’s sense of agency, then sure, try and do work to reduce the threat, but acknowledge it’s just as important to help the people, the animals, and the environments after they’ve been damaged.  So, there’s always something you can do that makes a difference. Nobody is going to say to you: I didn’t appreciate your help because you weren’t working on the source problem. A good example are the fires in Sonoma. It’s a terrible problem, and most people just needed help. That’s just to say that if you think of the humanitarian support as part of the equation, then there’s always something you can be doing. The cool thing is that the organizing that is necessary is a lot of the same organizing that is necessary for preventing the problems. 

Have you heard of a woman named Joanna Macy before? 

No I haven’t. 

You should check her out. She is somebody who has been working on helping people get strong enough to deal with this stuff for decades, since the, I think the, 70s. She’s about to stop teaching, but she’s generated this whole movement of people who are trained to help others to deal with their feelings and to hook in. I did a training with her at a place called Spirit Rock, which is a center up in Marin, which organizes a lot of  politically active stuff. This amazing 6-hour training with her goes from this place of  ‘What’s to celebrate about the Earth? What can you be grateful for?’ and then going deep into the ‘It’s really bad right now though,’ and then coming to this place where you can bring the two things together, a place of gratitude and love and acceptance where you can work to make things better. At the end, she says, ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that they know how this is all going to end.’ I was really inspired about that, and I thought, We don’t know how this is all going to play out, and we can’t buy into the notion that we’re going to hell in a hand basket. That’s just too simplistic. Even if things go downhill, there’s still all this helping each other, and organizing that’s really profound and that we can all be doing. I don’t mean to sound resigned, I think the resilience hub is a place where all these ideas can meet. Also, I like the idea of blending physical resilience with cultural resilience. I’m a singer and a musician, so it’s a cool place to see this blending. But all this being said, I still feel overwhelmed. I’ve got a full life, a teenager, and a host of my problems to deal with.  

Regardless, it sounds like you’ve got a great framework to be building off of. 

I would say so. It’s helpful to understand the other kind of challenges and responsibilities that regular folks have. If you want to pull them in, you need to know where they’re coming from.