Kopkind Colony

Before the Cameras Even Come

What happens on the ground, with little or no notice, before a flashpoint moment brings national camera crews and other journalists flocking to a place and giving 24/7 attention to a civil disturbance, an act of state cruelty, a political or social victory for the people?

Laura Flanders has been covering the news behind ‘the news’ — before it’s deemed news — for decades. On Saturday, August 8, beginning at 6 pm, she will be the featured guest at Kopkind’s Speaker’s Night, a free public event that will kick off with a potluck. We will provide the basics. Bring a covered dish! Her theme: ‘Before the Cameras Come: Time as a Terrain for Organizing’.

A sparkling person and pioneering independent broadcast journalist, Laura currently produces and hosts Laura Flanders & Friends, which has as its tag line “Where the people who say it can’t be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it.” Broadcast nationally on public television and radio and available as a free podcast, it is a viewer-supported show about possibility, and proof, telling the stories of people around the country who collectively, over time, have been generating bold ideas for change and putting them into practice. From grassroots resistance to rising white nationalist violence in rural North Carolina, to exciting cooperative projects in Cleveland and Barcelona, to the organizing that elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City, Laura and Co. spotlight those working to build solutions now for a humane future: ‘This is journalism that connects the dots. We cover forgotten histories and future-shaping innovations’—from worker-owned enterprises to distributed business models; from civil rights movements to the public’s fight for control over essential resources like water, broadband and government itself; from the critical role of culture in progressive organizing to arguments for recognizing human desire as critical to building left movements and alternatives. ‘Laura takes you from boardrooms to backroads, urban centers to farming towns, investigating how record profits and rising poverty can exist side by side. She explores how wealth is created—and extracted—and how people across the country are reclaiming power over their lives, their land, and their labor.’

Laura, who has been a mentor and featured guest at Kopkind in the past, got her start in US media running the Women’s Desk at Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR). She created the radio show ‘CounterSpin’ in the 1980s, which, among other efforts, became a vital resource for examining the realities behind the Reagan administration’s terror wars in Central America, its indifference to the AIDS crisis, its attacks on women’s health, poor and working class communities, the arts and much more. At the same time, then and throughout her career, she has been interested in people’s resistance and creative collective power, amplifying the voices of people who are ignored — until something explodes.

Her talk, and the potluck for community interaction, will cap Kopkind’s seminar/retreat session for left organizers and journalists. Our theme this year, which the young people from around the country (and world) have been exploring from numerous angles and geographic perspectives, is Shapes of Creative Resistance: Lessons from Minnesota — a place whose rich, often invisible backstory of organization helps explain the extraordinary popular resistance there to ICE occupation this past winter.

It is our thrill that Laura will be joining us — and can be your thrill, too, Saturday, August 8, 6pm, at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford. Be there! (Anyone needing directions, email jwyp2000@gmail.com.)