|
Reprinted
with permission from WireTap, www.wiretapmag.org
Jared
Jacang Maher
April 12, 2004
"If I give food to the hungry, they call me a saint," Brazilian Bishop
Dom Helder Camera once famously quipped. "But if I ask why the poor
are hungry, they call me a communist." Colorado-based food gatherer
Justin Baker will tell you he isn't really interested in being either
one. Rather, the 24-year-old honcho of Conscious Alliance is more into
swapping one kind of hunger for another -- the appetite for music and
art, and the desperate craving for, well, food. But the carte du jour
of this non-profit is definitely more Chef Boyardee than escargot.
For the past two years Baker and other former students from the University
of Colorado have been using a particularly different approach to the
standard canned food drive. Working with rock bands and festival promoters
nationwide, Conscious Alliance trades concert-goers original rock art
posters for foodstuffs which Baker then distributes to the Indian reservations
that constitute some of America's most poverty-stricken counties. "This
is emergency food as we see it," Baker says. "There is so much aid that
we send out of the country when there is so much needed right here at
home…People in Boulder [Colorado] don't realize that six hours
away [in Pine Ridge, South Dakota] is a straight-up third world country."
Baker has spent nearly half his young life devising creative ways to
feed hungry people. At 15 he started up a Food Not Bombs chapter in
his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut that to this day is still run
by his younger brother. Six years ago, when Baker came to CU as a freshman,
he found himself ditching the dorms and riding the bus up to the outskirts
of the city so he could volunteer with the cooks at the Boulder Homeless
Shelter. He soon started up an early premonition of the local chapter
of Food Not Bombs. In the tradition of the group's punk collectivist
philosophy, he would often have to fly below the radar to "Jedi" the
ingredients needed for his weekly community meal servings, but he found
himself drifting away from the anarchist group's radical leanings. "I
was about the feeding and not the politics of it," he says.
After taking a class with Indian rights activist and CU Professor Ward
Churchill, Baker and a few friends began making regular trips to bring
food to reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. It was the historically
scarred Pine Ridge that made the deepest impact on him.
"It
is poverty that I'd only seen in infomercials," Baker says. "You go
into a house and there's like six kids and they are sleeping on a floor
with like standing water and trash everywhere." Rampant alcoholism and
unemployment, horrendous housing, and internal strife within the tribal
community had left hundreds of families completely cut off from the
support grid, says Baker. The religious studies major also felt a deep
connection with Native American spirituality and had formed a bond with
Floyd Hand, a medicine man and tribal elder on the reservation.
After two years of securing small donations and making food-runs to
the reservation, Baker, who had done an internship with the Boulder-based
tour band The String Cheese Incident, organized a canned food drive
at one of the band's Fillmore Auditorium dates in 2002. By telling fans
that they'd be able to get a free String Cheese Incident poster by bringing
in 10 cans, Baker pulled in over 4,000 pounds of food. He graduated
from college that May and immediately began staging more food drives
at other hippie-type rock shows.
The biggest breakthrough occurred when artist Michael Everett, who had
created concert posters for the Grateful Dead, began donating specialized
artwork for Baker to barter for cans. "[Everett's] artwork is so popular,"
Baker says of tapping into the collector's world of rock art. "We would
get 200 people or more over a weekend each bringing in 10 cans and it
just adds up really quick. Some people would bring 30 cans for three
posters."
Soon Baker was loading up 14-foot trucks to the roof with cans of everything
from black beans to clam chowder. That's when he says he realized the
potential of Conscious Alliance to fill a whole lot of empty stomachs.
Since receiving formal non-profit status last year, Baker and his Development
Director Glen Lovet have become something like food-drive rock stars.
Going on tours with bands like Sound Tribe Sector 9 and setting up shop
at dozens of festivals and sporting events nationwide, his group has
collected over 20,000 pounds of cans which will go to small food banks
in inner cities as well as numerous reservations, where he hopes to
build a number of food storage facilities. He has also become a kind
of a rock art curator with several artists clamoring to donate work
for future posters.
Cans don't pay for the thousands of dollars in printing, travel and
gasoline costs however, and in that vein it's a good thing that jam
band fans are not exactly the most, shall we say, responsible of people.
"People who forget their cans will buy the posters for ten bucks," Baker
says with the smile of a saint and a drive of a Marxist, "Thank God
for that."
For more information on Conscious Alliance, check out www.consciousalliance.org
Jared Jacang Maher, 24, is a freelance writer living in Denver, CO.
|
