Rewarding volunteerism comes from something more than the desire to beef up college applications or job resumes. It comes from a genuine care for issues that matter to you. Behind almost every major turning point in history is the power of collective action. Check out how you can get involved.

Here’s another attempt to get you off your ass and do something that will affect this world for the better. I know you’ve heard it before. From high school counselors threatening your chances of getting into college if you don’t have a million volunteer hours, to UF Preview pounding the message that college just ain’t college if you don’t belong to 50 different organizations, we’ve all been told the tired reasons to jump into the world of “community involvement.”

But such feats are usually unsuccessful because rewarding volunteerism comes from something more than the desire to beef up college applications or job resumes. It comes from a genuine care for issues that matter to you.

So why should you care? It’s hard enough to manage a 12-credit semester, a monotone part-time job and still find the time to do the laundry in between. And even if you do feel that passion and compassion that compels you to give your time, it’s hard to shake the lingering sense that in the long run, whatever drops of goodwill you can muster will not amount to anything in the ocean of problems in which this world seems to be drowning.

Yes, with the way history is written and taught, it’s easy to feel discouraged. It’s easy to get the impression that only people in high places, like celebrities and politicians, can make a tangible difference in the lives of others. When we believe that history is shaped by a string of brilliant individuals who have carried the masses forward towards social change through their superior talent and courage, we feel powerless before we’ve taken the first step. Reality, however, is quite different.

Behind almost every major turning point in history is the power of collective action, but even a single brave soul has the power to shake and change a community. In Gainesville, you don’t need to look far to find evidence of this.

Sallie Ann Harrison, a local women’s rights activist led the struggle to help victims of rape and domestic violence in Gainesville in the 1970s. Through her work with local churches and fellow activists, she opened the city’s first rape crisis center, a small space staffed by housewives and students devoted to counseling and even personally housing women who fell victim to physical and/or emotional abuse. Thanks to her work, thousands of women in our community now have an invaluable resource at their service.

The history of our city, and that of our nation, is a testament to the truth in Fredrick Douglas’s words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

So what will it be? You may go another year spending your free time flipping through hundreds of cable channels. And that is fine; the world will go on without you. Or as I did, you may decide to venture into the Civic Media Center on a Thursday afternoon, peek curiously in to see friendly faces sitting around the volunteer table and shyly ask, “How can I become a volunteer?”

Here’s a list of groups in Gainesville you can get involved with:

Civic Media Center

An alternative reading room and library of the non-corporate press, and a resource and space for organizing. Stop by any night of the week to catch different events like documentaries (Mondays at 8), organization meetings or panel discussions.
Location: 433 S. Main Street, volunteer meetings every Thursday at 5:30pm
More info and events at www.civicmediacenter.org

International Socialist Organization

With branches across the country, its members are involved in helping to improve different injustices, such as the movement to stop the war in Iraq, the fight against racism and anti-immigrant scapegoating, the struggle for women’s rights like the right to choose abortion, the fight against anti-gay bigotry and inhumane treatment of workers. ISO is committed to building a left alternative to a world of war, racism and poverty.
Meetings: Thursdays, 7pm, at the Presbyterian Student Center
More info: On Facebook, search for “Gainesville ISO.”

Students for a Democratic Society

A radical, multi-issue student and youth organization working to build power in our schools and our communities. It is committed to shifting the national priorities from war and occupation to jobs and education.
Meetings: Mondays at 6:30pm at UF in Anderson 34
More info: sdsgainesville.blogspot.com or on Facebook: “Gainesville area SDS”

Animal Activists of Alachua

A UF student group that promotes vegetarianism and animal rights on campus and in the larger community.
Meetings: First meeting of the semester is Sept. 3 at the Reitz Union room 346
More info: http://animalactivists.wordpress.com/

Queer Activist Coalition

A politically motivated activist group at UF fighting for full civil and social equality for the LGBTQ community.
More info: E-mail them at queeractivistcoalition@gmail.com or on Facebook: “Queer Activist Coalition (QAC)”. Also, check out a story written by their president discussing the group in more detail.

Human Rights Awareness

A UF student group dedicated to raise awareness and encourage activism concerning human rights violations around the world, particularly in cases of genocide.
More info: www.ufhumanrights.org

National Women’s Liberation

A Gainesville feminist group who meet to discuss and organize around women’s issues.
More info: E-mail them at nwl@womensliberation.org, or visit womensliberation.org.

Student/Farmworker Alliance

A network of students and youth organizing with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields.
More info: On Facebook, search for “Gainesville Student/Farmworker Alliance.”

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is a Nobel Prize winning grassroots activist organization. It fights to uphold human rights on the local and international level.
Meetings: Begin in the fall
More info: On Facebook, search for “UF Amnesty International,” or e-mail them at ufamnesty@gmail.com.

Bridges Across Borders

An international collaboration of activists, artists, students, educators and others who cherish cultural diversity and global peace. This organization addresses the root causes of violence and hatred in the world and examines the attitudes that cause humans to view each other as enemies and to seek understanding that allows people to appreciate each other as friends.
More info: www.bridgesacrossborders.org

Veterans for Peace

Through the lessons of their own experience, Veterans for Peace work tirelessly to raise awareness of the detriments of militarism and war as well as to seek alternatives that are peaceful and effective.
Meetings: First Wednesday of every month at 7pm
More info: E-mail the president, Scott Camil, at s.camil@att.net.

The Kickstand

The Gainesville Community Bicycle Project, The Kickstand, provides free or inexpensive bicycle-related services to anyone. The bicycle represents the most affordable, healthy and environmentally sound mode of transportation and recreation. The Kickstand seeks  to encourage individuals to learn to maintain a bicycle and to use it in a responsible manner.
Location: Find The Kickstand every Wednesday at the Downtown Farmer’s Market.
More info: www.thekicktsand.org

The Fine Print

Our mission is to serve the community of Gainesville by providing an independent, critically thinking outlet for political, social and arts coverage through local, in-depth reporting. If you have a passion for independent journalism, writing, art, photography or activism, you might just be the perfect addition to The Fine Print. We are always looking for new talent, so contact us.
More info: www.thefineprintuf.org or e-mail us at alt.publication@gmail.com.

Counterpoise Magazine

Counterpoise is a quarterly review journal of alternative publications and products. The magazine offers internship opportunities, as well as reviewer positions. UF and Santa Fe students are encouraged to apply.
More info: www.counterpoise.info

Committee for a Civilian Police Review Board

CCPRB is a group of concerned citizens who demand the creation of a Citizen’s Police Review Board to fight against the pattern of corruption, arrogance, bias and violence displayed by some members of the Gainesville Police Department. Students and members of the community are invited to join the committee and help demand accountability from our civil servants.
More info: E-mail them at gvillepolicereview@gmail.com

CHISPAS

The Coalition of Hispanics Integrating Spanish Speakers through Advocacy and Service (CHISPAS) is a student-run group at UF comprised of students and community members who are invested in the immigrant community and feel passionate about sparking change on and off campus.
More info: www.chispasuf.org

Protect Gainesville’s Citizens

A group whose mission is to provide Gainesville-area citizens with accurate and comprehensible information about the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site. Through analytical research, outreach education and community participation, Gainesville citizens will have an active voice in the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site cleanup process.
More info: www.protectgainesville.org

If you didn’t see the type of organization you’re looking for on this list, or you want to find out more, check out Radical Rush- an activist fair of student and community organizations organized by the Civic Media Center every semester. This fall, Radical Rush will be held Sept. 15 – 17.  Come out to the Plaza of the Americas to learn more about how to get involved and to meet some of the organizers that are making waves in our community.

Neighborhood Contamination

When Mary Ann Jones bought her house in Northwest Gainesville, the real estate agent said there might be noise every now and then, due to the nearby industrial facility. She was okay with that. She was not warned that her grandchildren could be exposed to a dangerous concentration of dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and a wide range of health problems, especially in small children.

“I felt like this man signed me a death sentence,” she said.

For slightly over a year, Jones has lived at 3118 NW 4th St. with her extended family, which includes three grandchildren. The top of her fence is wrapped in barbed wire, which separates her backyard from the 90-acre Superfund site previously owned by Koppers, Inc. She wants to move away but doesn’t have the financial means.

For 93 years, Koppers, Inc. operated a wood-treatment facility at 200 NW 23rd Ave, releasing industrial toxins — including arsenic, hexavalent chromium, creosote and dioxins — into Gainesville’s air, water and soil. The area is now ranked as one of the nation’s top-100 polluted sites. It has been designated a Superfund site — a place so heavily polluted with toxic waste that it poses a threat to human health and the environment — for 27 years.

“I’m scared to death,” she said. “I like to garden, but now my plants are dead because I’m scared to touch them. We’re pretty much stuck here.”

Her two youngest grandchildren – Carlos, 6, and Aaron, 3 – play outside every day without understanding the situation.

“We’re always telling them – if you drop anything on the ground, don’t pick it up and definitely don’t put it in your mouth. And always wash your hands when you come inside.”

Jones said she feels like no one has been there for her – not the local or state government, and certainly not the EPA. Her front yard is peppered with signs, which say things like, “Governor Crist – Where Are You?” and “Gainesville’s Dirty Little Secret is Out!”

The site is currently managed by Beazer East, the company responsible for cleaning up the site. According to disclosure forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Beazer was previously known as Koppers Company, Inc., and has an agreement to absorb environmental liabilities from the current incarnation of Koppers.

Legal battles over contamination have followed the companies around the country. Koppers currently faces lawsuits in Texas and Mississippi, though many of the claims have been dismissed. In its latest annual report, Koppers warned investors that, “Litigation against us could be costly and time-consuming to defend, and due to the nature of our business and products, we may be liable for damages arising out of our acts or omissions.”

Years of Uncertainty

Chris Bird of the Alachua County Department of Environmental Protection said the fact that Koppers was allowed to operate its facility for so long, despite the property’s Superfund status, has hindered the clean-up process.

“You can’t make a bed while someone is still sleeping in it,” he said.

Mitchell Brourman, a representative from Beazer East, said there are many reasons the process has taken so long, from Gainesville’s unique geology to discrepancies between state and federal regulations. He acknowledged, however, that the continued operation of the Koppers facility was one of them, “to some degree.”

Local activist groups, including Protect Gainesville Citizens, Ban CCA, and the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group, have documented a variety of health complications among people who live near the site, from cancer to skin problems. They also contend that an unusually high number of dogs and cats near the site have malignant tumors.

Tests performed by the city and state health departments indicate hazardous dioxin levels in an easement between NW 26 St and NW 30 Ave, which serves as a buffer between Koppers and nearby neighborhoods. In 2009, the Alachua County Health department issued a press release warning parents not to let their children play in the easement.

The press release also states, “Incidental ingestion (swallowing) of very small amounts of surface soil in the neighborhood north and west of Koppers is not likely to cause harm.”

Scott Miller, the EPA’s regional project manager, said evidence of cancer in the neighborhood residents has been “anecdotal” and that the EPA “has not observed that effect.”

“The Florida Department of Health is doing a study of cancers in the area,” Miller said. “They will probably be making a response to that specific question with respect to folks living there as well as animals.”

Local resdents say they have waited too long for answers. Protect Gainesville Citizens has received an EPA grant to hire technical advisers, but the grants cannot be used to pay for additional testing. Advisers can only help community groups make sense of existing reports.

“We need more data,” said Cheryll Krauth, one of the group’s officers. “There are reports of health problems, and we don’t know if they’re worse than the average neighborhood or not. The problem is that the entities responsible for testing aren’t telling us.”

For decades, the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group has not trusted the state, Beazer or the EPA. Last year, they sought help from the Law Offices of Robert H. Weiss, a firm that specializes in environmental justice.

In January, Xenobiotic Laboratories, Inc., an environmental consulting firm hired by the legal team, tested fine dust particles from inside nine randomly selected houses within a two-mile radius of the Superfund site.

“This is unique,” said Stephen Murakami, a Weiss attorney. “Indoor tests are rarely performed [by government agencies]. Outdoor soil testing is their standard, as opposed to indoor tests where it counts – where people live, breathe, and make their beds.”

The state has determined that the maximum dioxin concentration for soil outside to be safe is seven parts per trillion. Inside the nine houses tested, the average dioxin concentration was 400 parts per trillion. In one house, they were as high as 1.2 parts per billion.

While toxins can dissipate in the environment, they can accumulate indoors. Murakami said that while outdoor levels may take this into consideration, he believes the results reveal a substantial risk to human health, and called for additional testing. The test results have not yet been made public.

According to the World Health Organization, long-term dioxin exposure is linked to impairment of the immune system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, and reproductive functions. Chronic exposure may lead to several types of cancer. Small children face the greatest risks.

Mary Ann Jones was recently informed of the tests by Stephen Foster residents. She’s left to wonder whether her family’s ailments, from skin rashes to nosebleeds, are mere coincidences, or signs of toxic contamination. The uncertainty fuels her fears.

“The more I think about it, the angrier I get,” Jones said. “You can’t put no price on my life or my family. Why would you try to cover up something that you know is so deadly? Why do you think money is more important than the lives of my grandkids?”

Water Contamination

The Superfund site is dotted with retention lagoons – unprotected pits where toxic waste is stored, a legacy of lax environmental regulations before the 1970s.

Local agencies had warned that creosote and other compounds could reach the Floridan Aqufer, 200 feet below the surface. The EPA contended until 2001 that the underground Hawthorne clay layer would provide a protective seal (see illustration).

“We and some citizens had been telling them we didn’t believe that – you haven’t done the right investigations to know what’s happening that deep under the site,” said Rick Hutton, an engineer from Gainesville Regional Utilities.

After further investigations, experts from the EPA, Beazer, and Gainesville Regional Utilities all agree that the Floridan Aquifer is already contaminated. Now, chemicals are slowly moving towards the Murphree Wellfield, where Gainesville Regional Utilities draws the city’s drinking water supply.

“We have wells in between our site and the Murphree Well Field,” said Mitchell Brourman of Beazer East. “Those monitoring wells are consistently clean. The protection of Gainesville’s water supply is one of the premises of our work.”

Hutton said Beazer will probably need to dig more wells to contain “hot spots” of underground pollution, and pump groundwater out of the aquifer at a faster rate to ensure it can be treated at the surface before contaminants reach the water supply.

“We don’t think the low-rate pumping will work,” said Hutton. “The EPA wants to give it a chance. If it doesn’t work, we expect them to take further steps.”

What can we do?

Groups of concerned citizens, including the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association, Ban CCA, Protect Gainesville Citizens and the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group, have been working for decades to spread awareness of the issue and encourage community activism.

“Over 158 other sites have been closed since ours was declared a Superfund Site,” said Maria Parsons of the Gainesville Neighborhood Protection Group. “We’re still not cleaned up. Why? People coming together matters. You need to get active. Dig your heels in. Protest. Write letters. Make phone calls.”

Tia Ma, an officer of Protect Gainesville Citizens, has proposed the idea of using the property previously owned by Koppers to build an environmental research center, which would commemorate decades of anxiety and suffering, transforming them into a learning experience.

Brourman said Beazer East has “no problem” with that idea.

“There are going to be some public meetings where people can talk,” he said. “We’re all ears to those sorts of things.”

Want to get involved, or find out more about Gainesville’s local Superfund site and what different agencies and activist groups are doing to clean it up? Visit Protect Gainesville Citizens.

With seeds.

From fast-growing summer veggies to Florida wildflowers to culinary and medicinal herbs, our Guerrilla Gardening workshop turned into an insurgency of the downtown area.

The workshop, which I facilitated, made up the April edition of the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project. The ongoing project aims to provide workshops and skills concerning self-sufficiency, sustainability, frugality and ethnoecological wisdom to urban residents.

While Guerrilla Gardening might not seem to have much in common with homesteading, the two practices are ripe with similarities.

Guerrilla Gardening is the practice of finding a fertile piece of land within an urban environment and gardening it– regardless of who the land belongs to. Typically the land is in a public space and gardened with the intention of offering that space and its fruits to everyone in an effort to challenge the mainstream ideas of land ownership and use.

During the workshop, participants made seed bombs by combining moist, composted manure with flour and seeds to form a sticky ball, teeming with potential flora-to-be. We then wandered around only a couple of blocks, noticing the abundance of fertile land, which before had only been appreciated by the most common and prolific weeds. We stealthily scattered our little bombs of hope, catapulting some and dropping others only inches from our feet. We seed-bombed empty lots, street medians, business lawns, dirt mounds and long-abandoned garden plots, then quickly regrouped on my front porch to talk guerrilla-gardening etiquette and philosophy.

The most obvious reason one resorts to guerrilla gardening may be self-sustainability. But there are plenty of other viable reasons to spread the herbaceous love.

First is the idea of providing local organic food, accessible to anyone who happens upon a plot. Guerrilla gardening creates an intersection between self-sufficiency and a deeper-rooted class struggle, as the gardens offer a healthy option for all people. Another reason may include bioremediation, which is the use of plants and microorganisms to naturally consume and break down pollutants in an environment. Plants are also very helpful in breaking up those pesky concrete slabs that don’t seem to serve any purpose. Growing plants in public spaces also sows the seeds of synergy, understanding and communication.

Which comes full circle to the idea of urban homesteading. The mission of the Gainesville project, manifested by Mary Doyle, is to “organize hands on, accessible workshops designed to share our skills and resources for creative self-reliance and a more sustainable urban community.” Mary admits the project is “a work in progress.”

“It was the awareness of my own ignorance that inspired me to initiate this project,” she said.

Originally the intention of the urban homesteading project was to begin reclaiming lost skills and forgotten knowledge once necessary for survival. As the project has evolved, a skill-share model has unfolded, based on the theory that everything we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a community is already here and we can “do it ourselves.” As the project continues to take form, new meaning and purpose arise.

One purpose of the project is to enrich the local economy and cultural ecology. One of the first workshops hosted by the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project was a lesson in beekeeping. As a result, 130,000 new bees were introduced to Gainesville, creating 13 new colonies, all working diligently to pollinate the gardens and wild flora of the local biotopes.

“Let us remember that we have honey bees to thank for pollinating about one-third of all the food we eat,” Mary says. “If all goes well for these local neighborhood apiaries, we may have a million honey bees working hard to cross-pollinate our food and flowers while making us honey. This concept of cross-pollination is a great metaphor for the work of the Urban Homesteading Project in general.”

Another aspect of the project is the preservation and adaptation of folk crafts. By learning to make useful objects, such as candles, clothing, dishes, tools and jewelry, urban homesteaders can feel confident relying on their own creative ingenuity, rather than depending on Wal-Mart and Target to deliver.

“This has the potential to invigorate our local craft economy while simultaneously reducing our use of fossil fuels to import our consumables from across the globe,” Mary said.

Another gathering led the urban homesteaders to the Dare to Dream Alpaca Farm in Newberry. We were able to witness the shearing of several alpacas and buy the wool directly off their backs. Afterward, we learned the traditional art of spinning wool by making a drop spindle out of wooden craft dowels, old CDs and wax. We progressed from spinning the less accessible wool to spinning ideas of making yarn out of grocery bags, bicycle tubes and any other waste product we could think of to create beautiful samples of modern craft.

Last, yet equally important, the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project focuses on survival.

“Maybe our money will continue to save ‘us’ from droughts, floods, earthquakes, not to mention human violence, but I doubt it,” Mary said. “It is the last frontier of our privilege to remain ignorant, imagining ourselves safely insulated from the hardships being experienced by so much of the world.”

Every day, average Americans drive to their jobs, work for about four hours and then take a legally mandated lunch break for 30 minutes to an hour. After about four more hours of work, they go home.

But Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia’s workdays were nothing like that. Gina and Lowlee were Honduran sweatshop workers, and they worked as long as it took to make their quota with unpaid overtime, a 15-minute lunch break and medical deductions from their $40 weekly paychecks that amounted to a lack of decent medical services. But as horrific as that sounds to students in the U.S., this job provided them with the few resources that they needed to keep their families alive.

Now that they’ve lost even that, Gina and Lowlee no longer have the chance of giving their children an education or any hopes of owning their own houses.

Lowlee, a single mother of four, can no longer afford to pay for her children’s transportation to school, so she was forced to discontinue their education, Lowlee said in Spanish, alongside Gina, at a presentation translated to English. She also had to suspend the medical treatments that her mother was receiving, as she can no longer afford it.

Gina had a big dream of owning a small house for her family to call its own, but now those dreams are long gone along with her job, Gina said at the presentation.

These two women are not alone. Gina and Lowlee are just two of the 1,656 workers who lost their factory jobs at Hugger and Vision Tex, two Honduran sweatshops, in January 2009, leaving them with no resources to sustain their families.

Many people in Honduras have no other choice but to work under such conditions if they want keep their families afloat, Gina said.

But Gina and Lowlee are not like most people in Honduras; they have decided to take a stand for their rights in order to stop the inhumane treatment of sweatshop workers. These two women are traveling around the U.S. in a 30-state tour starting in Florida and ending in Washington, funded by United Students Against Sweatshops, hoping to find people interested in their message who will take a stand beside them.

“We are in this journey knowing that we will be put on the black list, but we just don’t care anymore,” Gina said. “We just want to fight for what is fair because if these conditions keep going, they will get worse, and we fear that they might even lead us to a state of slavery.”

To kick off their tour, Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF last month about their struggles in the sweatshops and their problems without it.
They explained that after they were fired, the workers from both of these factories were negleted and denied their severance pay.
An estimated $2.1 million was owed to these workers in severance pay.

To date, Gina and the unemployed workers from Hugger have been able to recover 21.5 percent of the money owed to them by selling the leftover machinery from the factory. Lowlee and the workers from Vision Tex have been able to recover 26.5 percent of the money owed to them using this same method.

The women explained how important it is for people to be aware of where their clothes are being made and who is making them. Everyone can make a difference just by being informed and buying clothes that are not made in sweatshops.

“Many people think that protesting against sweatshops won’t help us because they think that any job is better than no job,” Gina said. “But while having a job is better than not having one at all, continuing on this path will lead to worse things.”

But protest can do much more than one can imagine. It brings to light problems that were sitting in the dark before given attention. Those problems, in this case, are the ones that Gina and Lowlee are going through.

“By bringing these former Nike workers, we are hoping to make our campaign stronger by educating people on what is going on,” said Rama Issa-Ibrahim, president of Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “I think people can draw a closer connection to the cause if they meet people who have suffered or gone through the hardships of working under precarious conditions that are presented in sweatshops.”

It is for the rights of individuals, like Gina and Lowlee, that organizations like Human Rights Awareness on Campus and UF Amnesty International work for.

These two UF student organizations partnered to form the Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus, a campaign they’ve led with the support of many other campus groups over the last year.

The purpose of this campaign is to make UF apparel sweatshop-free, said Elena Quiroz, executive officer of UF Amnesty International. Furthermore, Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus wants the university to adhere to the standards set by the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights organization led by university faculty, students and labor rights experts who work to regulate fair wages and the treatment of garment employees, especially in the factories that produce college-affiliated clothing.

The WRC gives workers a voice by putting them in contact with universities who are willing to speak up for them. Universities that are affiliated with the WRC give companies a code of conduct by which they must abide, and if a company breaks this code, they are then penalized by law.

“Already, more than a hundred universities have affiliated themselves with WRC because of student opposition to sweatshops. This includes Florida State University, Arizona State University, Washington State and of course a huge number of other public universities, as well as private ones,” said Rafiya Javed, vice president of external affairs for Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “UF currently abides by the standards set by the Fair Labor Association, but these aren’t comprehensive enough and do not ensure that subcontractors are actually even treating their workers fairly.”

The problem is that the FLA receives much of its funding from the apparel industry itself, so it encourages the companies to set their own rules. It also does not require that workers be paid a living wage, which is essential to live a poverty-free life.

Campus activist organizations believe that the switch to the WRC would make a tremendous difference in the lives of individuals like Gina and Lowlee.

For the same $50,000 that UF spends annually on its FLA membership, it could join the WRC, which exposed the injustice in Honduras. Joining WRC would also allow UF to require the companies who sell the licensed apparel that UF students buy to pay their workers a living wage.

“Joining the WRC would ensure that UF-licensed clothes would not come from sweatshop factories,” Issa-Ibrahim said.

The Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus campaign has already had some success among administration.

On the morning Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF, representatives from both of these groups met with administration officials to discuss the possibility of a change to the WRC standards, and they were told that the university would start to move forward in the process, said Emily Flynn, president of UF Amnesty International. About a week later, the University Athletic Department signed off on the preposition.

A letter of intent has been signed by the university saying that it intends to join the WRC. As of now, the university is working on drawing up a code of conduct and when to begin enforcement.

UF joining the WRC is expected to have a great impact on the sweatshop industry and the companies who buy from it.

It would put pressure on the companies to follow the rules put out by the WRC and give power to the universities in terms of being able to regulate and penalize the companies for misconduct, said Rod Palmquist, national organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops. UF ranks No. 2 in sports apparel sales by the Collegiate Licensing Company, so joining the WRC will have a tremendous influence on athletic apparel companies, as well as other universities.

“UF kind of taking the lead will hopefully make universities think twice about joining as well,” Palmquist said.

Cabot/Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville. Photo by Robert Pearce.

Tia Ma, a local massage therapist, no longer feels comfortable treating clients at her house, eating herbs from her organic garden or letting her cat roll around in the soil. When she moved into her home at 708 NW 31st Ave. two years ago, she didn’t realize the dangerous consequences of living there.

“I’ve noticed more and more animals with tumors in this neighborhood,” she said. “To hear that three doors down the street, people are dying of cancer and houses are going out for sale – my heart has been broken.”

Slowly, Ma learned about a nearby place called the Cabot/Koppers Superfund Site.

For 93 years, Koppers Inc. operated a 90-acre industrial facility at 200 NW 23rd Ave. The area is now ranked as one of the nation’s top-100 polluted sites. In 1983, it was declared by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a Superfund site – a place so heavily polluted with toxic waste that it poses a threat to human health and the environment.

For decades, Koppers released industrial toxins into Gainesville’s air, water and soil, including arsenic, hexavalent chromium, creosote and dioxins. Combined, these chemicals can cause cancer, rare diseases,

Tia Ma and her cat.

changes in DNA and birth defects.

There’s a 500-foot buffer around the site, including ABC Liquor, Ward’s Supermarket, the Salvation Army, a daycare center and dozens of homes, which the City of Gainesville designated an “area of special environmental concern” in 2005.

Cheryl Krauth is an officer of Protect Gainesville Citizens Inc., an organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the issue. She said the EPA is currently doing too little too slowly to help the residents who live near the site.

“We know there are homes along the border of the site – roughly 20 of them – who received letters from the [Alachua County] health department saying, ‘Don’t allow your children to play in the dirt; don’t grow gardens in your yard; and stop using your wells,’” she said.

The letters also included other warnings, such as, “Do NOT get soil in your mouth, bathe upon reentering the house, and keep a separate set of ‘play clothes.’”

Cindy Harrington, a resident of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood, has been working with Protect Gainesville Citizens for years to help her neighbors. Nonetheless, she secretly hoped her own home would be safe, as it was located across Northwest Sixth Street, outside the buffer area. Slightly over a month ago, a private environmental consulting firm tested nine homes, including hers, revealing evidence of high dioxin levels.

“If you feel your health is at risk and you want to leave, nobody wants to buy your house,” Krauth said. “So there are lots of residents that feel trapped.”

Joe Prager, founder of a local organization called Ban CCA, has personally experienced the damaging effects of industrial toxins. His daughter was born with a cleft lip and a cleft pallet despite his wife’s efforts to stay perfectly healthy during her pregnancy. He later learned that the defects stemmed from his wife’s exposure to CCA-treated wood products, which contain a dangerous mixture of copper, arsenic and hexavalent chromium.

Prager’s personal tragedy led him to years of research. From 2005 to 2008, Prager served on the Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee and decided to investigate Koppers.

He asked for reports from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and found that the water run-off from Koppers contained arsenic levels that were eight times higher than what was acceptable near a residential area. Copper levels were 18 times higher. There was one patch of land in which the dioxin levels were 24,377 times higher than the accepted residential standard.

“There have been reports of cancer clusters, large numbers of pet deaths from cancer, [and] more than one case of multiple sclerosis nearby,” Prager said.

In 1988, Koppers sold their property to Beazer East, a private developer who is currently responsible for working with the EPA to clean up and redevelop the area. Despite the property’s Superfund status, Koppers still operated the lumber-treatment facility and continued their toxic operations until 2009. That’s when Koppers decided to leave Gainesville, after all the investigations and bad publicity. Now that the operations are closed, the EPA has a chance to finally do its job.

“The EPA has done little or nothing for 26 years,” Prager said. “They appear to have a cozy relationship with industry as a rule.”

If the EPA doesn’t move faster, there could be permanent consequences. There are spots on the Superfund site where creosote oils – highly carcinogenic toxins – have leached through layers of rock and soil toward Florida’s aquifer system 200 feet below. From there, the pollutants could potentially flow north into the Murphree Wellfield, where Gainesville Regional Utilities draws the water supply for Gainesville and other surrounding communities.

“I’ve called this site the greatest environmental issue for Alachua County, and I still think that’s true,” Prager said. “Our drinking water is at stake here.”

How can we, as a community, hold Beazer and the EPA accountable? Groups like the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association, Ban CCA, Protect Gainesville Citizens and Gainesville United Neighborhoods have been working hard to spread awareness of the issue and encourage community activism.

“The EPA says they’ve done almost 10 years of studies,” said Ma, who is now involved with Protect Gainesville Citizens. “We have no idea what those studies are. I want a compilation of all the tests that have been done so we can make decisions together. I don’t want to create bad guys. I just want honesty.”

Local activists are calling out to concerned residents, including UF students and professors, to educate themselves on the issue and to contribute whatever skills they might have. This includes a call for artists, photographers, journalists, urban planners, engineers and just about anyone else.

“I think the city of Gainesville and UF can really come together with some creative ideas,” Ma said. “I think it can be an amazing win-win. We should just admit that we’ve fucked up. And we can utilize the resources we have in this town. We can do our best to clean it up and do so publically and teach others how to do it so this never happens again. It’s not OK to just sit back and let the company decide how to make money on their 90 acres after they clean it up.”

Ma’s lease on the house will expire in July. She plans to permanently leave before then. Ma is a healer, and her beliefs include leaving places in a better condition than how she found them. Her goal is to fill the entire meadow around her house with ferns and sunflowers, known for their ability to heal the earth by absorbing industrial toxins.

A lot has happened since this story was written. New tests have been done and the results are disconcerting, to say the least. For testimony from a troubled family living next door to the site, as well as responses from GRU, Beazer, the EPA, and GDEP, check out A Haunting Past, Pt. II.

Note: Follow The Fine Print’s complete coverage of the festival, which runs March 19 through March 24, here.

Paynes Prairie, as captured by Dom Martino, a recently deceased local nature photographer, whose work will be on display at the festival

Environmental journalist Trish Riley has lived in Gainesville for three years. The one thing that bothered her was what seemed like a lack of environmental news, especially regarding local issues. In the summer of 2008, while signing books at Goering’s Book Store, she asked the audience, “How green is Gainesville, anyway?”

Everyone in the audience, which included UF students and Gainesville residents, had a story to tell about some kind of grassroots project they were working on, but not a single person knew about anyone else’s project. What the community needed, she realized, was the opportunity to get together and combine their efforts. Without widespread awareness, this could not happen.

“I realized there’s not much environmental news that makes its way through this town,” Riley said.

She started a web site called GoGreenNation.org, a resource for environmental awareness, and a Gainesville chapter of Green Drinks, an international organization for people interested in living sustainable lives. Her goal was to post information on every environmental project in the community so concerned citizens could gather and collaborate.

Green Drinks started meeting on the first Wednesday of every month. At first, there were only three members. By December 2009, there were 60 people at the organization’s first anniversary. This is where she met Shirley Lasseter, the cinema director of the Hippodrome State Theatre.

“I told her we need to have an environmental film fest,” Riley said. “There are so many cool movies that don’t show up in Gainesville, you know, because they’re not Avatar.”

Lasseter had been thinking the same thing. She enjoyed showing documentaries, but they were a hard sell. She and Riley worked together to create something new in order to open people’s eyes.

Photo by Dom Martino

On March 19, their creation will come to life: The First Annual Gainesville Environmental Film and Arts Festival. It’s a 10-day celebration of the earth and its resources – a chance to learn about the problems the earth is facing and how to build a better future.

“It’s all about positive personal action,” Lasseter said. “We were careful to choose films that give you a way out, that give you an idea, that provide light at the end of the tunnel.”

The festival will be more than just a series of films. Everyone will have the opportunity to speak with local experts in the lobby of the Hippodrome about what can be done in Gainesville to make a difference. There will be long feature films, as well as short ones. Topics include environmental history, overfishing, green building construction, plastic, soil, lawn fertilization, the importance of organic farming and organic foods, herbal medicine, phosphate mining (a huge issue in southwest Florida), water contamination, vegetarianism, and alternative energy, among others.

“We’re planning to have special organic treats and goodies on certain movie nights from local farmers and local restaurants,” Lasseter said.

On March 27, there will be an Eco Fair at the Sun Center with vendors, community organizations, musicians, artists and eco-dancers. The Heart of Florida Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, as part of a Haiti relief project, will demonstrate how to build an “earth bag home,” a sustainable, earthquake-resistant shack. The materials required to build an entire shack can fit neatly into a rain barrel. The goal of the project, known as Barrels of Hope, is to send rain barrels filled with supplies to Haiti, thereby providing people with a means of shelter and water collection.

The Alachua Department of Environmental Protection will sell rain barrels at the fair. A rain barrel is a 55-gallon drum that can be put underneath agutter system. It captures rainwater, which can then be used instead of sprinklers to irrigate a lawn.

“Fresh water is a finite resource, and to pour half of it on the ground, as we do in Florida, is crazy,” Riley said.

On March 28, there will be nature outings with local professional tour guides. Throughout the festival, all of Gainesville’s most prominent galleries (basically, everyone who participates in Art Walk), will showcase art with a focus on ecology and sustainability. Lorelei Esser, a self-taught sustainability artist, and Chris Fillie, a co-manager of the South Main Community Arts Center, have been working together to rally local artists behind the festival.

The gallery at the Hippodrome will feature work by local eco-artists, like John Moran, as well as work by Dom Martino, a renowned Gainesville photographer who recently passed away, leaving a legacy of beautiful pictures that highlight the plants and wildlife of Paine’s Prairie.

The films and art will come together to serve a unified purpose.

“My goal is to spread environmental education to the community,” Riley said. “This festival is an extension of that work for me.”

The three-day Harvest of Hope Foundation Music and Arts Fest is back for its second year, March 12

The Harvest of Hope Foundation, a “non-profit organization that provides financial, educational, and service-oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country,” according to its web site, was founded by Phillip Kellerman in 1997.

Kellerman’s initial exposure to issues concerning migrant farm workers came from his involvement in 1989 with the ESCORT Migrant Education Program at the State University of New York in Oneonta, where he answered phone calls for the National Migrant Education Hotline. Kellerman says he received hundreds of calls from about 25 states, including Florida, from migrant farm workers seeking emergency aid for “vehicle repairs, housing, utilities, clothing, food, medical services and helping their children in schools.”

“I soon discovered there was not much federal, state or local help in these states. There was no help out there,” Kellerman said. “That’s what led me to set up the Harvest of Hope Foundation.”

In 2004, Kellerman moved to Gainesville.

“Before I left, a good friend of mine I worked with in Oneonta contacted her friend, Ryan Murphy,” Kellerman said. “He really liked the foundation and what I was doing.”

Murphy, who was getting his master’s degree in bilingual education at UF, worked in an afterschool literacy program called Libros de Familia, which promoted literacy to migrant children in Alachua County. The program received funding from the HOH Foundation to buy books, fund afterschool workshops and get UF students involved.

“I met with Phil, and I was excited about what he did [with the Foundation] and asked what I could do to help raise funds,” Murphy said. “I worked at No Idea Records going to school, and once I got involved with Phil, I wanted to bring the two worlds together. Knowing Harvest of Hope needed money, the most immediate thing I could do was to put on benefit shows.”

Murphy thought some bands he knew would be interested because “their politics would fall in line with helping workers and social justice issues.” Murphy asked his friends in Against Me! to play a benefit show, and “they took the ball and ran with it,” he said.

“They did a series of shows around the country and raised $18,000. It got us motivated and inspired Phil to realize other avenues of fundraising.”

“We just thought there was a really good connection between grassroots, alternative and progressive musicians and the grassroots work the Harvest of Hope Foundation was doing,” Kellerman said.

While setting up a benefit show for Against Me! and some other local bands with Ryan Detera of Café Eleven in St. Augustine, Detera mentioned he had “just become the general manager of the Fairgrounds and why don’t we do three days. I laughed because it seemed ridiculous compared to what I wanted to do.  He said, ‘You do the Fest in Gainesville. I think you would have the ability to do it here,’” Murphy said.

As a non-profit organizing an event of that size, HOH was eligible for a grant from the county. They applied and received $50,000, the largest grant ever awarded. The money comes from tax revenue received through tourism, which is then allocated to aid organizations seeking to do special events in the county.

“Once I got together with everybody who works on the Fest and motivated everyone and got them on my team, we couldn’t look back,” Murphy said.

Through both Detera and Murphy’s connections, they began to assemble the 2009 line-up for the first HOH Fest.

“I know a lot of bands, punk bands, through No Idea, and Ryan [Detera] knows smaller indie bands through Café Eleven. He was also booking through the Fairgrounds, so he was working with agents [of national bands] as well,” Murphy said.

They came up with a diverse selection of punk, indie, hip-hop, folk and acoustic.

Last year, although 7,800 tickets were sold and 17,000 people came through the gates, nothing was raised. Kellerman explains it was a first-year test, and “most first-year tests lose a ton of money.”

But Kellerman is not disappointed with last year’s turnout.

“Even though we didn’t make money, the off-shoots from the fest were wonderful. We had a lot of bands, subsequent to the fest, doing their own benefits for the Foundation, locally and around the country. Was it worth our effort? Yes!”

This year Kellerman hopes to see double the attendance of last year and give a stronger focus to the HOH Foundation cause.

“The first year we just wanted to create a general awareness of what it was all about.  This year there will be a much stronger focus on what HOH is about, with a strong emphasis at tables and the non-profit section that works with the migrant farm workers.  There will be a double CD of last year’s event available, as well as a documentary of the first year that incorporates the music and the message” on sale at the festival.

The CD is currently available now at fail-saferecords.com and interpunk.com. Three-day passes to the HOH Festival are available at harvestofhopefest.com for $49.50.

Photos courtesy of Morgan Bellinger – www.movephotography.com/ – and Celia Roberts – www.celiaroberts.com

A few blocks from Tim and Terry’s, Tygur nervously smokes a cigarette. His eyes are red and watery from the other four he just smoked. Every time he gets invited to freestyle onstage at a bar or club, he walks around town and bums as many cigarettes as he can. As the performance draws nearer, he asks me to buy him a beer. I say it’s a bad idea.

“Nah,” he says, “It’s cool, man. You know I do better when I’m fucked up.”

Tygur One, an underground rapper, has lived on the streets of East Gainesville since 1998. A year later, he started an unofficial record label called Phatt Boy Entertainment, which has provided recording time to nearly a hundred local rap and reggae artists.

Tygur can usually be found downtown at Bo Diddley Plaza, rolling his own cigarettes. On a typical day, he wears a colorful beanie over his dreads. The faded black outline of a tiger is tattooed on his left cheek, barely noticeable against his dark skin. Just above his other cheek is a patch of scarred flesh where his face hit the pavement in a motorcycle accident.

Ever since Tygur arrived in Gainesville, his life has been driven by music.

He wants to give every artist he meets on the streets a chance at recording, even if all he can offer is a few pieces of old equipment.

“I wish I could reach all the youth and start a change in society,” he said. “Those young fellas, they gotta grow up and reach for the sun.”

Tygur said music is what saved him from living the wrong kind of life.

“It was a war between gangs, where I come from,” he said. “We were foot soldiers, fighting for superiority on the streets. Only the strong survived.”

Tygur was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At 3, he moved with his family to Chocolate City, Georgia. In his early childhood, Tygur listened to his dad play reggae and blues with a keyboard, guitar and drums. He started hearing music in his thoughts constantly, which helped him deal with the reality around him. Most of his peers were involved in drug dealing and gang fights.

As he got older, Tygur drifted from his family. His Haitian father envisioned him finding a stable job and conforming to the family tradition of arranged marriage. He began to skip school so he could roam the streets, looking for ways to make an extra buck. Tygur said that’s when his “dark side” developed. At 13, he met a new role model: an older drug dealer.

“A smooth cat,” Tygur said. “A real cool Jamaican. His name was Boxy.”

Boxy asked Tygur to wash his car each week in exchange for some money. In the meantime, Boxy sold marijuana discreetly to passersby.

“It caught my eye,” Tygur said. “The fast money. He started letting me sell weed for him. The more I did it, the more we became friends.”

At this point, Tygur had dropped out of school and rarely went back to his house. He slept in alleys, playgrounds, tunnels and abandoned railroad tracks. At 16, he bought a keyboard and began to practice whenever he could. Still, most of his attention was directed elsewhere.

“By then, I was part of a street fraternity,” he said. “I was selling the most drugs. And this guy I knew, who had a pawnshop, he and my father were best friends. My dad would get all these antique guns and shit and store them in the shop. Getting guns was easy.”

He also found a partner-in-crime: a young man his age named Rodney Jackson, who had his own six-member hip-hop crew called King of Beats. Rodney was the kind of guy who could fracture someone’s skull with one punch. He and Tygur raised hell together.

“Back in those days in Georgia, you had to have a gun,” Tygur said. “I had several. You pull a gun on me, we get into a fight, and I grab your gun. That’s how my collection formed.”

Tygur’s interest in music was still alive. Whenever they could, he and Rodney would show up at clubs and freestyle together. At one of those clubs, Rodney got into a fight. The other guy pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol and shot him in the head. As Rodney was airlifted to the hospital, Tygur realized how alone he felt.

Meanwhile, his talents and resources led to a new lifestyle. By his early 20s, he had a two-bedroom apartment, three cars, and a girlfriend named Alicia Kirkpatrick, who helped him get rich. Together, they recruited eight girls who sold their bodies and brought in tons of clients, including lawyers and police officers.

Spiritually, Tygur felt bankrupt. Alicia fell into a downward spiral, snorting more cocaine than she was selling. Rodney had recently left the hospital in a wheelchair, permanently paralyzed.

“The first time I saw him, all I could do was cry,” Tygur said. “He told me, ‘All this shit you’re doing, man, you can end up like me. The police are watching you. All these boys hanging out with you, they’re not really your friends. They’re all waiting to get you.’”

Tygur said that’s when he started to see the light.

“I realized life is serious, and a gun can really fuck you up,” he said. “I turned to music to escape the drama.”

With Rodney gone, the King of Beats had fallen apart. Tygur sat alone with his keyboard, searching for inner peace. He left Alicia and left the apartment. His travels, which mostly consisted of hopping buses, led him to a small college town in Florida with a thriving independent music and art scene.

“Gainesville was a good place for music,” he said. “A lot of local bands. I made friends with punks and joined the underground movements.”

When Tygur was sitting in a bar one night, depressed, he met a girl named Sparkle. She was a beautiful work of art, with pink, white, blonde and blue-striped hair, fishnets and “at least seventy piercings on her face,” he said.

Sparkle took an interest in Tygur’s music and introduced him to her friends from The Wayward Council, a nonprofit record store on West University Avenue. They invited him out to a place called “the spot,” an old clubhouse on Depot Road, to record some music and party. Thus began his new lifestyle.

Since then, Tygur has rapped at Brophy’s, Tim and Terry’s, The Laboratory, The Kickstand and more parties than he can keep track of. He moves his studio equipment from place to place, such as the backrooms of convenience stores, depending on who will grant him time and space.

“I was living in Babylon,” Tygur said of his life in Georgia. “In Gainesville, I found Zion. Zion is life, art and music. I want to bring Zion to Babylon, you know, and tear Babylon down.”

Tygur is 36 and continues to sleep on the streets. His goal is to find a permanent place to store his equipment and record some music. Until then, he stands and waits for shows, compulsively bumming cigarettes.

To hear some of Tygur’s music and learn more about his life from Tygur, check out Introducing: Tygur One.

I heard about the restaurant first through word of mouth. It wasn’t even open yet, but some of my friends were getting involved. It was opening where 2nd Street Bakery used to be. I heard I should look into getting a job there. I also heard about some kind of “buy-in”. What’s up with that, I wondered.

It was explained that the restaurant is a co-op, a business owned by the workers. The workers purchase shares of the company, and when the business profits, everyone profits. If at some point I must move on beyond the restaurant (or am asked to leave), the money returns to me.

To get involved in this new entity, Civilization, I would have to buy a $1,000 share of the company, one of many equal shares. I didn’t have to pay it all at once; I could put portions of my earnings towards the buy-in or contribute hours working around the restaurant doing landscaping, for example, or generally making things better or creating artwork for the sculpture garden.

The idea of having to pay money in order to get paid kind of bummed me out. I had no idea what it would be like working at a place like this, and I would be invested in this business, meaning it was a commitment. I was also hesitant to get a job in the food service industry, having had bad experiences in the past.

I worked at a Panera before and spent most of my pay-earning hours changing trash bags, bussing tables, being “nice” to customers, hosing off the dishes and spoons, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning restrooms. Over three months, they let me make about five sandwiches for customers, and I paid half-price for maybe 50 sandwiches. It seemed like they had an endless stream of new workers to do the less palatable jobs, and those people would either eventually quit or move up the line if a spot opened up. No one wanted to do what I was doing. I felt no attachment to the place and there was no pride in my work, but I always got paid on time. I got a nice apron and a hat, some flimsy name tags, dishpan hands, and a reason to never eat at one of those places again.

A few months later, I was making sushi at a place called Voodoo Lounge. It was all dead fish, sharp knives and buckets of pink ginger. I could have cut off a finger. At first I loved the job because, to me, I was being trained in this esoteric art form — edible sculpture. I felt I was doing something productive. As for the ambiance, it was all low-watt bulbs and black paint. And around 10:30, when the sushi bar packed up, the bartenders came in, the lasers turned on, the club music fired up, and in came everybody looking to get liquored up. These were not peaceful times for plastic-wrapping fish, nor for wiping down with bleach water. It was never explained to me how things were run there. There was a boss, one manager, and one cook, and I don’t think they knew what was going on either. I did not always get paid on time. After a few months, I wasn’t learning anything new, and our discriminating “clients” just wanted their rolls deep fried or with beef or chicken instead of fish.

Despite my hesitation, I was at a point in my life where having a job was more important than having a good job. I rather like the idea of getting paid, and I like to be learning skills while working; I like food, and I’m willing to clean all kinds of crap. Joining Civilization started to seem like my best possible option.

The restaurant was a particularly promising prospect because as a co-operative it possessed something fundamentally different than the other places I had worked. I eventually slapped together an up-to-date resume and made an appearance.

The grounds were serene. The artwork was tasteful. Everything was well put together. It all made me start doubting that I had what they needed. Thankfully, by the end of the week, I got a call from Chef Maschafino. I came back in to talk to him, and he gently explained the whole co-operative thing to me again. I started the next day.

I wowed them with my dishwashing dexterity, and the restaurant impressed me as well. Everyone was genuinely friendly, the cooks made sure I ate something, I was free to take breaks as I needed them, and at the end of the day, I was even offered a glass of wine. Everyone kept thanking me for what I was doing. That night I left a little damp, but in high spirits. I was completely happy with the situation I had gotten myself into — a boss-free workplace. or something to that effect, John thought it more accurate

This new work was liberating. I was immediately open to meeting all the denizens of Civilization — they all just seemed so independent and personable. I used to avoid talking to co-workers, as I didn’t want to talk about work at work, or outside of work for that matter. I was under the impression that hearing complaints more often than hello or goodbye was normal.

At Civilization, if I have a complaint, letting other people know is actually productive. It’s the same if I have suggestions for improvement. I can bring up the matter at the weekly meeting, and it can be voted on democratically. As it turns out, every place is unique, and there are many ways a business can be structured and particular interpersonal dynamics for each.

It seems like everyone at my sweet new job wants to be there; we have invested ourselves, and we trust the organization. Civilization works for us.

Co-operatives cannot incorporate in Florida, so they have to either operate as corporations or limited liability companies. Other states allow employees, or combination of employees and other people, like customers, to form nonprofit mutual benefit corporations or similar entities to do things like run a restaurant or a farm.

Civilization is located at 1511 NW 2nd Street, and is now serving morning coffee, lunch and dinner.