Tonight from 7-9 PM Grange Future will be inhabiting the community space that is Shaping SF. We will have presentations by Matt Senate, Brewster Kahle and Severine Fleming along with our traveling Grange Future pop-up exhibit on display.  The event is free and open to the public. 

Mutual aid societies proliferated during the gilded age, as workers, miners, loggers, and farmers joined together in fraternal orders. The Grange, or  patrons of husbandry" was such an order, founded in 1867 by forward thinking farmer Oliver Kelley, assisted by his niece Caroline Hall. Grange Future is a celebratory tour organized by Greenhorns, a young farmers cultural organization. This will be our 9th stop on the tour-- investigating the revival and preservation of the grange as a commons. It's an inter-generational event to help interpret the radical history, and potential of the grange for both greenhorns and the grey-hairs who've loyally tended this community-owned institution, its lovely halls and ritual practices. 

As victorian as it is Occupy, the grange holds a powerful critique of monopoly capitalism. The grange was the first order to give equal votes to women, and operated as a social hall, economic reform organ, and legislative training facility for the populist movement.  Grangers believed mightily in yeoman agriculture, in direct democracy, and in equal access to information and science. Grangers successfully organized thousands of co-operatives across the country as well as the 8 "Granger laws" regulating railroad monopolies, and lobbied successfully for Rural Free Mail Delivery -- the equivalent in its day to rural broadband or electrification. 

Aren't today's cooperatives, open source licenses, hacker-spaces and mutual-aid associations an analog response to Gilded-age type concentration of capital? Is the grange a venue for the sharing economy, today's populists and common-wealth advocates working on a public-banking to rescue a failing Post Office (threatened with privatization), the community seed banks (threatened with USDA regulation), to host buying clubs, co-packing facilities, affordable rural day-care and fix-it potlucks? As a generation with 1.3 trillion dollars in student loans, don't we need a club-house for community action, democracy schools, and doesn't it not matter if we aren't all farmers?

This tour brings a multi-format exhibit showcasing the radical themes of Grange history to more than a dozen Grange halls in the state of California. It’s a chance to interact with next-generation grangers working on inter-generational truce-making. It's a chance to learn how to operate the microphones, the power breakers, the correct arrangement of pots. In short, it's a place to meet the keepers of the Commons. Severine has created a slide show presentation with contemporary echoes of Grange Spirit. We continue to sniff out and study, and perform oral histories on emergent cultural forms and trends. So far we’ve documented: Pancake breakfasts, benevolent societies, community orchards, seed libraries, and community canneries. Our exploration of past and present populism continues. Listenhere for the podcasts of the Grange Future Oral history project. 

Matt Senate collaborates with many others on the Omni Commons, a grass-roots initiative to forge a commons in the east bay within a 20,000 square foot former Italian social club (and former music venue). Using a spokes-council model and horizontalist organizing practices, the Omni Oakland Collective is constituted by member collectives and operates on a consensus-based process, as well as with do-ocratic values. He is a co-founder of the Sudo Room, an Omni Commons member collective, and home of the Sudo Mesh project launching the People's Open Network, a community-owned and -operated wireless mesh network.

Brewster Kahle has been working to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge for more than twenty-five years. Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle invented the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999. Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W. Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. In 1983, Kahle helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as a lead engineer for six years. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive.

Severine Fleming is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in the Champlain Valley of New York. She is director of Greenhorns, a grassroots organization with the mission to recruit, promote and support the rising generation of new farmers in America. Severine has spent the last seven years gathering, bundling and broadcasting the voices and vision of young agrarians. Greenhorns runs a weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network and a popular blog. They produce many kinds of media, from documentary films to almanacs, anthologies, mix-tapes, posters, guidebooks and digital maps. They are best known the documentary film, “The Greenhorns” and the raucous young farmer mixers they’ve thrown in 37 states and 14 grange halls. Severine is co-founder and board secretary of Farm Hack, an online, open-source platform for appropriate and affordable farm tools and technologies, as well asNational Young Farmers Coalition which now boasts 23 state and regional coalitions.  She serves on the board of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, which hosts Agrarian Trust, her latest startup, focused on land access for beginning farmers, and permanent protection of affordable organic farmland.

Grange Future is a community history project undertaken by The Greenhorns to investigate the the Patrons of Husbandry as a 125 year old populist movement, and to showcase the Granges and Grange-like organizations continuing to work, and organize in this spirit. We see the Granges as an appropriate vessel for futurist, family-farm oriented community action, with a strong basis in economic theory, resistance and cooperation. We hope to embolden greenhorns in our network with an entry-point into the grange movement, to unlock and revive the many grange halls currently hibernating: to use the syllabus of past actions to inform contemporary ones, and to reclaim the radical politics of the grange at the local and national levels. With this project we’ve captured the history and current activities in audio, visual, and written form, we’re gleaning the institutional wisdom from decades of agrarian organizing, and connecting with the broad community tackling similar themes throughout the nation. Community is the pre-condition for action, if you too feel inspired by the grange, we hope you will join in the convening, the kinship and the future-making.