Tag: Equity-Centered Practice

Kim Allchurch Flick: Hello everyone. I’m Kim Allchurch Flick on the podcast today, with Theresa Logan. Theresa is a facilitator, trainer, and consultant based in Portland, Oregon, with 20 years experience in community organizing, community development, public policy engagement, organizational equity. Conflict resolution and restorative justice.

She approaches all of her work with a critical analysis of the race, gender, and power dynamics that are present in every interpersonal conflict, every group and organization, and every social structure. Theresa’s deep holistic skill set offers clients and workshop participants, tools and frameworks for transforming conflict into opportunities for collaboration or in collaborative problem solving, creating strategies for mitigating and repairing racial harm and healing, personal and collective trauma in service of universal human wellbeing.

Today we’re gonna talk about strategy and solidarity. And if a topic like this wasn’t needed anytime more than now, I mean there probably have been some many historically, but true to fact now is one of those times when you were an important person to have in the world.

We met not because we were, I import, we’re both in Portland, Oregon. It was more accidental that I found. Strategy and solidarity, and we’ve never met in person online and I’ve taken the courses and I am dedicated to learning in the framework that you and Carlos provide.

What has been your journey and the values that have shaped and guided you up to this point?

Theresa Logan: I think Carlos, who’s my business partner and I were just driving back from a trip to San Francisco over the weekend and we were sharing even more of our life stories than neither one of us had known for an hour drive. So I’ve been giving this some thought about my journey and some of the things that got me where I am today.

I do say in doing racial justice work as a white woman, that I’d certainly never do it alone, right? That I’m always working in partnership and collaboration with my colleagues of color, because that’s what’s required to, to combat these systems of white supremacy and patriarchy and capitalism is to be willing to be part of a collective when we’re so trained by society through movies and pop culture and all these things to be like the one, the hero, the answer, spend a lot of time arguing about whose opinion is right or wrong, to remember that we are all part of a collective. And so I think that is one of those values that’s driven me through my journey through, interesting experiences. Probably not unique in the history of humanity, but maybe not so common for someone of my background.

I’d say I always go back to starting with being the child of a teen mother who moved us from Bend, Oregon to Portland, Oregon in 1989 so that she could pursue a four year degree at Portland State University because there was no four year university in Bend, Oregon at that time. And so I got to get a sociology degree along with my mother as a.

A child from 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh wow. 

Theresa Logan: Elementary school through middle school. And so she often came home and told us what she was learning about at school that day, which was a lot about gentrification and racial inequality and how to critically analyze the world around us. My sister and I mostly sound really annoying.

So I tell parents like, it may not land, but you are planting seeds and they may or may not develop in the way you expect, but when you’re a parent, you are planting seeds with your kids. And so having that critical analysis of the world around me was something, an amazing gift that she gave me at a fairly young age.

And again, as a. White girl growing up in one of the whitest cities in America, in Portland, Oregon, in the nineties. I went to Harriet Tubman Middle School, which is a predominantly black school at that time. And so I had a cultural immersion without leaving my city. And I’d say from, pretty much from middle school, through college, lived in the whitest city in America, but did not have very many, if any, white friends.

And I was also in a, raised in a multiracial family. So I myself am not genetically multiracial. And so I had that experience of being adjacent and within Portland’s black community for most of my life. And understanding those places where I found cultural affinity and belonging, but also the ways where my whiteness, just how to navigate that, right? Trying to understand what it was to be white in a black community and what it means to be part of that community while recognizing the ways that I will never share those experiences of living the experience of blackness and getting taught and learning how to stay in my lane and recognize, my privilege and my place and where I was overstepping and what’s just not for me, right?

Because I don’t actually share that experience. 

So I’d say those were pretty foundational experiences of my young life that set me up to follow my mother’s footsteps into a sociology degree. Among other things, I came out of PSU with about five or six degrees of learning. Yeah. So I did end up was very fortunate to get a scholarship from the Ford Family Foundation.

Is here in Oregon outta Roseburg, not Ford cars, but the Roseburg Roseberg wood products Ford family who gives about a hundred scholarships a year to low income. And I underprivileged students in Oregon. And they pay for my entire undergraduate and a good chunk of my graduate degree.

Part of that included being able to study abroad. I was able to take my loans and go spend a summer in Guatemala at a language immersion program to learn Spanish, and I spent a semester abroad in Spain, another semester abroad in Cuba. And so many things there. It’s gonna go back, I guess even before then.

Probably one of the things that may have helped me get that scholarship is that I traveled with my, I was, I’m not very. Practicing Catholic anymore, but at the time, through our Catholic church, went on a pilgrimage to El Salvador when I was a senior in high school to, it was for the 20th anniversary of Oscar Romero’s assassination.

And so we spent a week in El Salvador really traveling through all these places that had been involved in the Civil War and learning about what the. FMLN and the radical Jesuit priests and other folks who were really fighting for social justice and really brutally oppressed, had endured and hearing first person accounts from folks who fought in war.

And as an American, civil War, revolutionary War feels so far away, like things that happened in the past, but really being in a place where folks had just, lived through that kind of brutal violence really gave me more of an understanding of, you know what we mean when we talk about revolution when Americans talk about revolution, it often is an abstract story that might be in a movie sometime, but when we’re talking about revolution in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and Cuba in Venezuela, like there’s a whole, excuse me, whole different lived experience of what that really means, what it takes to engage in that, and then what it takes to rebuild something on the other side that isn’t just replicating the harms of the past. So that was a pretty foundational experience. And then I when I was in Cuba, we were an amazing group led led by a Chilean expat who we landed in Havana and the next day we hopped on an old Russian plane and flew to the other end of the island in Santiago, and spent the next two weeks retracing the steps of the Cuban Revolution across the island with a professor who himself had fought in the Cuban Revolution.

Again, just a really amazing, like visceral voyage through history. That helped me understand a lot about strategy and solidarity and what it takes to create not just reform of an existing social system, but to truly enact a revolution that tries to set up something completely different.

And how often are our dreams and aspirations, many things Cuba has achieved and also many, many challenges. Along the way especially right now. I met my ex-husband in Cuba and so I married into a Cuban family and still have family on the island.

And again, seeing what our family over there is enduring. Though I got divorced, we have three kids together and I still consider all his family. My family, again, a different level of understanding. When we talk about struggle and hardship here in the States, I’m like, well, we got running water and electricity all day long, so we’re doing pretty good.

So I’d say those have all been fairly foundational experiences in my life that really put me on a path of thinking about strategy and solidarity. Lots more. I could say I was a community organizer in college. I went and worked at the Inter-American Foundation after college supporting grassroots community development projects in Latin American and the Caribbean I worked with, immigrant families doing early childhood development in Washington, DC when I was in grad school getting a master’s in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University. And then somehow I found myself back in Portland, Oregon. Unemployed as a mother welfare said, how did this just happen? I’ve been traveling the world and doing all these things.

I was a professional in DC living my best life, and then all of a sudden I was in my mother’s basement, unemployed with a baby in my marriage on the rock. And it was 2008, so we’re in the middle of that. Or no? Oh yes, 2010. It wasn’t 2008, it was 2010, 2011 and we’re in the middle of the recession.

So I had a fresh master’s degree. I was ready to go out and get a master’s level job and no one would hire me in Portland for anything. So it was a really humbling moment after having had all these experiences and a lot of professional su success in my career up to that point. I ended up working part-time for the national Survey on drug use and health as a bilingual field interviewer, and as I’m naming all these places, almost none of them exist anymore as of 2025 because they’re all programs have been shut down by the Trump administration, the Inner American Foundation. Oh my. There was a suit in place to try to get it restored, but they’re a very small agency compared to U-S-A-I-D, but they were shut down the same way U-S-A-I-D was.

Last year, the national survey on drug use in health, I think has had most of their funding stripped away. And that’s really where we get most of our information and data about how many glasses of wine per day people have, or how many kids have tried this drug or that drug. It gives us really important information that helps us plan public health and policy.

So I think most of that’s been shut down. I was just like, yeah, in one year I think they shut down pretty much all the funding in every job I ever had. I am sure they’ve shut down the funding for early childhood development and those sorts of things. And let alone, instead of trying to support our immigrant families, people are hunting them down in the street regardless of the circumstances of their arrival or what could be waiting for them back home.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Wow. 

Theresa Logan: Yeah. And then I moved on to work at the Oregon Foreclosure Avoidance Program and help set that up as we’re coming out of that recession to help homeowners, find strategies for moving forward. ’cause the banks are so terrible that they’re just like, lose your paperwork and not process things and you couldn’t talk to anyone on the phone.

And so Oregon in instituted this program that required the banks to meet in mediation. And while they weren’t gonna come up with some magical solution to save people’s homes, if they could not afford to continue paying for them, it did require them to show up and be accountable. And make sure that they were processing paperwork correctly, that they were following the law and hold them accountable without putting all that burden on homeowners alone.

We’re in the middle of crisis. I’m not sure how to navigate it. And then I got hired after several years of volunteering as a mediator and facilitator at Resolutions Northwest, which was I think maybe still has one small mediation program going, but has also lost a lot of its funding local organization doing mediation Center.

And they had just merged when I got hired with Uniting to understand Racism, which was running kind of a nineties style. Racial awareness dialogue program. And the merger really infused everything r and w was doing with a focus on racial equity. And so we were doing public engagement facilitation for the city.

A lot of conflict mediation. But more and more we started getting calls from people who were. Either having racialized incidents or incidents of racialized harm at the organization and needed someone to come help them figure out how to move through that in a restorative way.

Or people were trying to move forward racial equity work and encountering a lot of conflict in doing that. So we started getting a lot of calls for conflict resolution, specifically around racial justice and racial equity issues. Our consulting work really grew out of that. We didn’t start off.

And Carlos and I who now have our own independent practices did not start off ever thinking racial equity consultant was a job. I don’t know that it still is in 2026, but it really grew out of working at a conflict resolution center with a racial equity, racial justice focus, and then getting a lot of calls from folks and a lot of conflict.

Because working for racial justice does not minimize conflict. It tends to exacerbate conflict in organizations. Like getting the puss out of a wound. Like you gotta clean out the gunk that’s in there if you’re gonna let it start healing. Otherwise it’s gonna keep 

Kim Allchurch Flick: right, 

Theresa Logan: Getting more infected and growing.

And so after getting a number of those calls and working on a number of those cases, we started to just recognize the systemic patterns. And so we were able to work with organizations more intentionally around. What are the systematic approaches to mitigating and minimizing harm and inequity in organizations?

And also increasing not just increasing diversity for diversity’s sake, but increasing the skillset and lived experience and appreciation of what folks who have historically been excluded from the places and positions of power bring to an organization and how to. Bring people in and make the most of their experiences and not tokenize people or, sideline them or traumatize them because they’re not agreeing with your limited perspective.

And so we left resolutions northwest around 2019. Weren’t necessarily expecting to work together for, but had one client contract that we picked up together on the way out the door. And I have continued to find a lot of success together, working with mostly public agencies and nonprofits to transform their cultures, to support leaders.

And again, not just being more inclusive, but being very strategic in in, in shifting their outcomes. There’s a, we, diversity, equity, inclusion were never our favorite words because they became very buzzwords. There’s a lot of performative things happening around DEI that weren’t actually shifting outcomes for staff of color or customers, clients the communities of color that, that right agencies work with.

So our focus was always more on human rights and racial justice. And so we’re able to work to transform systems and cultures to shift their outcomes fairly successfully over the past six and a half years to ago. Six and a half years. It’s a little rough right now in 2026. There’s not a, certainly not the boom of DEI contracts and commitment that there was in 

Kim Allchurch Flick: indeed 

Theresa Logan: 20 21, 20 22.

There are people who are still deeply committed and because of federal government has shut down so much funding for so many social programs across the board. It’s just created such a budgetary crisis for everyone, everywhere. I’m not sure about other states. I’d say in the Pacific Northwest and probably most of the West Coast, there’s still a deep commitment, probably 80.

When we go into organizations, 80, 90% of people would tell us that understanding racial equity is essential to their job. Not important, not interesting, but like essential. Essential, what they’re trying to do, absolutely essential. And that commitment and that understanding is still there, but the funds to bring in folks who have the expertise to help shift those systems to do that just aren’t there.

So we, we do see people still making an effort, still moving where they can and there’s just so much hostility trying to shut things down with legal challenges. Some of those have been one, there was an important one recently where the Department of Justice and Department of Education dropped this dear Colleague strong arm tactic they were trying to use to intimidate school districts away from any kind of anything that could be related to what they call DEI, which is don’t ever talk about people of color or women.

But that they lost an appeal twice on that letter, and so they’ve dropped it and rescinded it. They’ve done a lot of harm in the process. But the legal challenges aren’t always catching the headlines, but are successful. So that’s a very long but also short version of my path and where we’re at today.

Kim Allchurch Flick: And so impressive, so relevant. So. Interesting and intriguing, and there’s a couple of things I’d dislike to summarize that pop up for me as also it’s, I grew up overseas, but not in not in Latin America at all Holland, Belgium and England, but still outside the US and different, and being exposed.

To different cultures. I think, has really helped shape my world views particularly, even though I didn’t realize it was when I was a kid. But looking back, it really frames things. And you said a couple things that are super important about the importance of history and what does revolution mean and tracing someone’s steps.

And when you were saying that, it popped up a story I heard on NPR yesterday about. Haitians in Springfield and someone was talking about the Haitian community that is afraid that they will be deported back to a country that has no infrastructure or very little gangs. It’s very dangerous. And the stereotypical assumptions of who the Haitian people are and the local people who live around them are saying, no, you’ve gotta understand these people had their leader assassinated.

Have had earthquakes, have had so many things happen, and the people that left the country, not because they wanted to leave their home but for survival are the doctors, the lawyers. And they said the brilliance and the capabilities that have brought been brought into that community are being welcomed by a lot of the local people.

And we’ve gotta get past. That’s why I’m so anti stereotype. It’s so wrong. And you also talked about data, and I was thinking when data is shut down, journalism doesn’t have as much to work with and flow of data shuts down, then a population is somewhat blinded. And when that happens, that’s where historically and understanding history, this.

These chapters have been written before and absolutely many times over. And to recognize that if we recognize it and with the kind of work you do should help us put the guardrails up early instead of saying, oh, that happened before it’s happened again. Stop the cycle before it gets worse. 

Theresa Logan: Even with Haiti, we can go all the way back to Haiti was the first country to successfully stage a revolution in the Western hemisphere, post colonization.

They were the first independent nation in the Western hemisphere, the Haitian Revolution. Yeah. And the anti-blackness and the fear of black liberation drove so much of colonial policy in the rest of the Americas and the US in particular. Fear of but they’re gonna come here and do the same thing.

That’s why we have to keep these people enslaved and keep them in line. Like the way that Haiti was used as a cautionary tale for the rest of the Americas. Yes. And the way that the, you know, difficulty Haiti finds itself in today is an entirely a function of the way Haiti was. They didn’t call it an embargo at the time, but held responsible for paying reparations to France for its own freedom.

Cutoff from global trade by the rest of the colonized world. It’s not an accident that, oh yes. Assassinations. Who was involved? How has the US and other countries, influenced what’s happened in their politics, but also just the global anti-blackness that really made Haiti a pariah in the middle of colonization when the global powers, European powers were trying to hold onto their colonies and the rest of the hemisphere.

The US and other countries that were engaging in the slave trade, were trying to protect their property, their ability to traffic human beings, and it just, the, it feels so appalling to see the Epstein files and all these things coming out, but the threads go directly back. It’s not hard to see where they go back to.

How much exploitation happened in, in the Caribbean islands when Yes. Where, that’s the place where Columbus first landed, right? Was Haiti. And we call the whole island Espanola because of Haiti and Dr two different countries on one small island, but Id was the name, the indigenous people called it and the havoc and just atrocities that were wreaked on the indigenous folks there by the first colonizers.

We are still paying for that today. Haiti’s still paying that for that today. We’re still paying for that today. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah, in human lives in many other ways. And your perspective also about how it’s important to recognize what we have compared with people who are living without running water and electricity.

There’s a lot to work with here. I was wondering how this wonderful arc of your very young life so far and and that knowledge of history is shaping what you’re doing now. 

Theresa Logan: How is it shaping what we’re doing now? Right now and I’m not sure when this will broadcast, but next week, starting February 10th through 26th, we are running a community learning lab called conflict Resolution for anti-fascists.

And a lot of what we’re trying to do there is draw on these lessons from the past, from history of other revolutionary and anti-fascist movements and look at what lessons we can learn and how can, how we can apply that today. There is among a certain mainstream population of the United States, a lot of this is unprecedented and it’s all fallen apart and we’ve never seen anything like this before.

And I understand where that’s coming from, but it’s absolutely not true. And re trace these patterns all the way back through the entire history of this country through the entire history of European colonization, of the Americas. And so to not fall apart because our level of expected comfort and ease is falling apart.

But to find ourselves to find strength and lessons and all of the many freedom fighters who have come before, Harriet Tubman, who with a very severe disability, freed like 800 people from enslavement, 750 of them in one raid that she led during the Civil War. Yeah. So many, right? So many lessons.

Hatuey was a Eno indigenous leader. When Columbus and them landed and he fled Haiti to go to Cuba to warn the Taino folks in Cuba that those Spanish were coming. And then he led a gorilla warfare for several months. So tried to fend off the Spanish and do everything he could to get them out of Cuba.

He was eventually caught and burned at the stake, and while he was on the state, the Franciscan friar is like, do you wanna like claim Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior so you don’t go to hell? And he was like, are the rest of these Christians gonna be there? He was like, yeah. He’s like, absolutely not.

Send me to hell. I don’t wanna be anywhere y’all are ever again. So it’s like there’s no 

Kim Allchurch Flick: recognizing recognition of what’s real. 

Theresa Logan: Yeah, absolutely. And we can carry that thread of those horrific acts of violence and acted on indigenous people in the Caribbean when the first Europeans arrived.

Absolutely follow through to people who will sit in Christian churches today and not do a, not do anything to support people who are being harmed in the street. Like these threads carry through, they’re not brand new. In this conflict resolution for anti-fascists, we’re looking at history to learn those lessons and to remember, we don’t have to start from scratch.

We don’t need to rebuild the wheel. We’ve been doing this and black and indigenous folks in particular have been doing this since the, arrival of the colonizer age. And if we’re willing to sit back out of our own narrow perspective and recognize, where we are, how we got here, and who has been fighting this fight already.

Then we can’t pick up the torch that they’ve left us and carry it forward instead of feeling like we have to start some brand new thing now. So that’s one part of is history. The other part of is really thinking about how we engage with conflict. We have terrible conflict resolution skills in our society overall.

It’s a lot of based on domination and control and how can I force others to get my way.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. 

Theresa Logan: And so we’ll be talking about how we engage with conflict specifically in the. The current, rising fascist landscape, it requires different tactics. But if we only go to the old standbys of

Try to yell until I get my way or go to violence, it just escalates into more violence. But to really think about who am I trying to move and what’s the best way to move them? If I spend all day yelling at people who have an entirely different worldview and understanding and do not care about the things I care about online, I’m probably not gonna move them anywhere, but deeper entrenched into their point of view.

If I also just spend my time arguing with the people who I’m trying to build with until I get my way, because I think I know the right way and they’re wrong, we’re probably not gonna build a very effective movement. So thinking about where collaboration is helpful, where collaboration can lead to abuse and harm.

There’s a kind of basic conflict resolution methodology. Assumes that everyone’s moving with, good as good enough intentions to meet a basic need and working in good faith When you have people who are actively trying to cause harm to others, just kidnapping people off the streets want to imprison people for profit and want to strip people of their rights, like that’s not the time to collaborate.

We will end up getting harmed and abused because they will weaponize and take advantage of our good faith and willingness to be thoughtful and empathetic and creative. So thinking about what strategies work, where and how and to what end. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And I am delighted that I signed up for it. I think there’s always something to learn, even though I try to continuously learn and apply, there’s always something to learn and to put good use of the lessons that you teach.

So I’m very impressed by that. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. And what. What problems are you seeing in your work and in the community and solutions that you’re able to use for you and your work and also the solutions you’re providing for others? 

Theresa Logan: Oh, the problems. The problems. We’re living through the fall of an empire and we’re living through the fall of an empire.

In a culture in which we’ve been taught to be like prioritize individual success and failure, right? And so living through the collapse of an empire and then feeling like it’s my fault that I’m struggling to keep my bills paid while the economy is crumbling around me. So I think that’s one of the biggest issues I see is just like everything is changing.

For the better in the immediate term. I hope that in the long term there is the potential to take the transformation that’s happening in this time and push it towards that just and thriving future for all that we’re working towards. But it’s gonna be very challenging in the short term. And so just getting to a place where things we’ve taken for granted are not going to be reliable anymore is a really hard place to be for folks.

Human beings tend to be really good in a crisis. Like in an acute crisis, natural disaster, something like that, we can come together and do the most amazing things for each other. We have a lot harder time working through like chronic sustained stress and trauma because it just becomes too much. And so I think as we’ve seen a Minneapolis, the, I’m not even gonna call it silver lining, I’m just gonna say the like honest human response.

To the occupation of a city has been all of this really incredible organizing. And it’s not to romanticize or pretend like it’s not taking a very high toll on folks there because it is, but we can also see what we’re capable of, right? Which is of this like self organizing and just small neighborhood level units who are taking whatever action they can to protect their neighbors and themselves.

Not that they’re a hundred percent successful all the time, but they really are. Making a difference and building the kind of cohesive web of relationship that we need to move through the compounding and continuous crisis we’re probably like to see for, at least the next decade, maybe more.

How things go. So that’s part of the problem and it’s just, when everyone is struggling, it’s harder to feel like we know how to support one another. If mostly everyone’s, got a job and one person loses their job, we can do a GoFundMe and help that person get their rent paid.

But if nine of the 10 of us are out of jobs, we can’t pay our rent, then, it becomes a lot more challenging. So I think that 

Kim Allchurch Flick: absolutely 

Theresa Logan: scarcity of money, resources is gonna be a big challenge for folks right now. I think that will force us whether we want to or not to turn to the abundance of other resources available to us and human connection and connecting with the earth and figuring out how we make do with less than we’re accustomed to.

But it’s not gonna be easy. It’s not gonna be fun. And I think that interconnectivity and return to recognizing our relationship as part of the earth. Not just ants walking on it, but as like the ants, one of the fabulous creations that the earth has made, pretty much a sent mud walking around out here.

Those are things that will allow us to create something different on the other side. I don’t know that I will get to see it, ’cause I think it’ll take several generations to get there. But I. I am finding hope in recognizing myself as one chapter in this great long story going back to Hati and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and 

All the folks who’ve come before they played out their chapter and I’m playing out mine and hopefully leaving something for my kids to continue to work with. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And you’re making me think about what it’s like to be in arcs of history and. How history speaks. And now I’m hearing stories of there’s an example of someone who’s lived in an apartment for seven years and doesn’t know any of their neighbors and decided to knock on doors and say, how are you?

And put a QR code, print it up in elevators and say, do you wanna connect? This is the, how can we do this? And sometimes that grassroots power, small, mighty. Very local can be transformative. And I’m also hearing how much that our words do matter and in ways that are expressed, where it brings in the masses and the collective of those voices really does something.

Theresa Logan: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And we. Go ahead. 

Theresa Logan: We’re so socialized into this like instant gratification, hero culture of some, no, someone needs to go out and make a stand and do the thing, and that will change everything tomorrow. And I think maybe ’cause of the way we’ve made story made movies about like the civil rights movement and things like that.

Without understanding the years and amount of organizing, relational organizing, strategic planning that went into those movements, that it was not just a spontaneous protest. Rosa Parks didn’t just not feel like moving that day. That was a planned effort. She was chosen very specifically because she was light skinned and pretty and would be a more what do you call it?

A victim we would have more empathy for than if she was a older, darker skinned woman or something like that. There’s, there was strategy there, there was planning, there was many years of thought going into this or other people who had refused to move before and it didn’t lead to the whole Montgomery bus boycott.

There’s a great deal of planning and strategy that go into these things. And so trying to help folks realize that it’s not just, well, I want it to change so it should change. ’cause that’s not how we get change. Right. But there is a lot of entitlement we hold as Americans about des deserving and demanding to get our way.

And so breaking out of that and realizing it’s not about being a hero or starting the, the general strike that will change everything tomorrow. It really is what you were talking about of do you know your neighbors? If the lights go off, who can you go get a candle from? Or how are you gonna stay warm if there’s no heat in your entire building?

Those ways where it’s like, how are we gonna get through challenging crisis together? And once we, when we know our neighbors and we have conversations and we can start to build that capacity for strategy and solidarity and organizing, and I say these things not to discourage folks from going out to protest or do whatever you can do today.

Absolutely do that and make sure you know your neighbors also. There’s been so much. Especially since COVID and even before, so much movement towards virtual communities of affinity around, political ideology or special interests or whatever that we found ourselves with in, in these small groups of like-minded people or large groups of like-minded people through virtual connectivity, which is beautiful.

And there’s also a way where it’s started to, detach us from connectivity with the folks we’re actually in physical proximity to which if things get real bad and the lights go off and there’s no more internet are the ones you’re gonna depend on for survival. So for me, I always tell people, you wanna see the revolution happen?

Go make sure you know your neighbors. Start there. Start by talking to your neighbors and finding out what they need, what’s most impacting them right now. And don’t just, throw them out because their concerns don’t immediately align with yours. But start looking for that, that shared common ground.

That, that does connect you in physical reality.

Kim Allchurch Flick: You wanna start the revolution, get to know your neighbors. That’s so quotable. I love that. With all of this, what makes you optimistic? 

Theresa Logan: Oh

I struggle with that one. I can go back and forth. There’s some days where, like today and we’ll set aside. Should not be this warm and sunny in Portland, Oregon in February. But the sunshine, I saw a hummingbird in the yard the other day and there’s like chaia trees, which I had learned are actually supposed to bloom in the winter.

And it’s not just climate change causing them to bloom right now. Going outside and filling the sunshine on my face and the wind blowing through my hair and just remembering that I’m alive in the world is such a miracle that any of us are here, that anything exists at all. Given what we know of, the rest of what we can see of the universe, like the fact that this much life exists here on this planet is just miraculous.

So that gives me hope, right? There’s been, not everyone finds this comforting, this works for my brain, but to look at the vast scape of scale of time, of life on this planet. It has been five mass extinction events before we even got here. Life still succeeded, right? Five times we’re like 90, 99% of life got wiped out on the surface of the Earth.

And that 1% that survived is what gave birth to all of this that we see here now, including us, right? And so that place of I don’t know if humanity’s running out the clock. We may be done. Maybe we deserve to be, I don’t know. On good days, I don’t think we do on bad days. I’m like, maybe. But to know that maybe plastic eating microbes will become the next, dominant species on the earth.

Clean up the mess we made. I don’t know. And I don’t need to know for me in my own spiritual understanding of the nature of life. I find that comforting in a way that’s not just about me, it’s about I have this incredible opportunity to be here today. How do I make the most of it?

I don’t know what’s coming next. I have no control over the evolution of humanity and whether we do or don’t save ourselves from climate catastrophe. 

I will do my part where I can to try to push things the way I would like them to go. As I did in the last presidential election, it did not go my way.

And yet we are still here and I have three amazing children and. My job is help them hopefully still get to live out whatever life is calling for them to be and do in the world. So those things give me hope. They’re pretty incredible, even just in one generation. I look at the difference between how I understood the world and many of the dumb mistakes I made as a teenager, largely based on my socialization as a woman in the society and be.

The awareness my children have about grooming and pedophilia and what’s right and what’s wrong, and they understand a lot of dynamics. I was still, I’m 43, I’m like on the cusp between Gen X and millennials. I don’t consider myself a millennial, but I’m definitely not real Gen X either. I was, I graduated in the year 2000, so I consider myself generation class of 2000.

I really am on the cusp. I have a lot of things in common with Gen X, a lot with millennials, but I really don’t identify with either. Anyway, in my era, we were still very much socialized into this, like older men, younger women. That was like desirable or romantic for younger women to have relationships with older men.

And my kids are disgusted. I don’t know if you remember or ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it’s like a 300 year old vampire with a 16-year-old girl. And my kids were aghast. I was like, none of us had that response in my era. I don’t think. It was just like, oh yeah, of course. My kids have no patience for that.

They’re such good self-advocates. They’re so self-possessed that they give me a lot of hope and optimism for the future and see a lot of, it’s not perfect. That’s not every young person, but I see a lot of hope in our young people who have so much more and emotional intelligence, ability to self-advocate and are not interested in going along with systems that don’t make sense and are not just.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, I love that. And it also makes me think that, these brains are gonna continue to do incredible things, be inquisitive and also be innovators of solutions. And that’s one of the things that keeps me optimistic is even when things feel like they’re falling apart, I learned that somebody’s creating something new and it’s gonna be amazing.

And in Portland we have a lot of. Innovators, there’s clean tech and there’s other incubators of people that are starting things and it’s encouraging. They’re not all gonna make it. Starting a business is hard, but they’re creating solutions to longtime problems and it’s pretty, pretty fascinating.

Theresa Logan: Absolutely. I think I have that and I, I do have a Pisces Sun, so it gives me a positivity bias, but. I do just see there’s we’re so incredible humans. Like the things we can create, are just there’s, we can absolutely solve climate catastrophe. We probably create more problems in the process because that’s how it goes.

But if we just invested our resources there instead of lining the pockets of billionaires and creating plagiarism machines that make people dumb. ’cause they stop thinking for themselves. You know, we could do so many things. And those are the days I feel less optimistic is like, why?

Why are we not all choosing that? The answer seems so simple and I struggle with that one a lot on the hard days, but 

Kim Allchurch Flick: sure. 

Theresa Logan: On the good days, I think, life is pretty incredible and Sprout will always grow. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, I agree with that. And also it depends on where we look. I was just listening to NPR today, the man who knows China very well and he was, he lives in San Francisco.

He was talking about how current, since COVID onwards, such a short window, the infrastructure that has been invested. Into China for transportation. They’ve been leapfrogging wind to go to solar. The forecast in a book called, here Comes the Sun, is that they’ll have much cleaner air in 10 years than any other city, even though they’re still really bad now.

But they’re knowing and that the difference he sees between the US and China is both countries are very wealthy. How that money is directed into infrastructure for populations and how they’re doing it. So well. I said, wow, we should take a chapter outta this book. Take a look. How could it be any compared it to San Francisco and the Bay Area, just in terms of transportation.

And it says it’s night and day difference, even though the money’s there and part of it is how it’s allocated, but also how it’s used and. He said that the US is good at litigating and China is good at creating and building infrastructure. And maybe that’s another place where our voices, locally can matter.

And I also have heard that if we call our Congress people and senators as business people, and the first sentence is, I’m a business owner. There’s some real weight to that and I got that from Oh, interesting. Camilla Taylor of the American Sustainable Business Network, which is a nonprofit that advocates and supports for businesses and also builds in a lot of equity into that.

So I think we’re also in, in networks that we can connect to and create a web of these thing, same thought processes and be grassroots about it, but do some big things. And I think you’re part of that the strategy and solidarity and the anti-fascist upcoming program that, that you and Carlos are holding is part of that, pushing needles, helping other people along.

It’s transformative. 

Theresa Logan: No, thank you. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Theresa Logan: Oh no. I’ve said a lot. We talk very fast. This might be one of the times where you have to slow down the podcast instead of speeding it up. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: No, I think we’re doing great. And how can people reach you? What are the websites and the socials where people can reach you? 

Theresa Logan: You can learn more about the strategy and solidarity collective@strategyandsolidarity.com.

You can join us in our online community, it’s strategy and solidarity.org. We have a free basic membership to join our community. We have a sliding scale for the conflict resolution for anti-fascists coming up next week. And we have other offerings over the course of the year where we are trying to build community and strengthen our ability to find strategies and build solidarity and create that world.

Not in one, centralized economy way necessarily. But in that beautiful way of if we let everyone do their own thing, we all have a lane, we all have a gift, we all have something to offer to this world right now. And if we can do that while also coordinating our actions together. We can create a lot more than if we’re each just trying to start our own thing.

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that. Thank you so much. And the closing question is, if you could have dinner with up to three people living or deceased, who would they be and why?

Could be one, could be two, could be so hard to 

Theresa Logan: pick. I’m thinking about all these people on our flyer for the thing from history and oh, there’s so many people. And I’m like they wanna have dinner with me though. I don’t know. I think I would like Tui Harriet Tubman and John Brown. I could invite a lot more people to this dinner party, but I’d start there and just see what lessons I could learn from there.

Really radically different, understandings of time and place, but also still entirely human right. And what, we have a way that we exoticize the past as much as we exoticize other people’s and cultures. It’d be really fascinating to be able to see what, how they framed their understanding of their experience and what parts of that would be radically different and what parts of that would be really useful to shifting our perspective.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Now that would be amazing. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to spend time with you. This is Theresa Logan and Kim Allchurch Flick signing off. Be safe out there. Thank you.