Two weeks after Johns Hopkins University administrators announced what they called a two-year “pause” on a controversial plan to establish their own private police force, about 100 students, faculty and community members marched to the home of Hopkins President Ronald Daniels to tell him that this proposed pause is not enough.

Wearing masks and trying to keep six feet apart, demonstrators gathered on June 29 at Tubman Grove near Wyman Park Dell, holding up signs with familiar slogans like “NO JHU PRIVATE POLICE” and new messages like “ABOLISH, NOT DELAY” and “IN 2 YEARS, COPS WILL STILL BE KILLERS.”

Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Lester Spence cited the reasons he has been opposed since Hopkins first announced plans for a private police force in March 2018.

“This would end up creating insecurity and making a number of staff, faculty and students feel unsafe,” Spence said, speaking into a microphone wrapped in plastic (to avoid contamination). “It would reproduce and crystallize the divide between Baltimore and Hopkins. It would double down on policing as a solution to a range of community problems.”

Hopkins Graduate student Erini Lambrides blasted Hopkins administrators for delaying rather than scrapping the plans amid a moment of national reckoning with the role of policing in society.

“We will be here from today to next year to the year after that, because when we say no private police, we mean no now, not in two years, not ever,” Lambrides said.

The crowd then marched to Daniels’ house on the Hopkins Homewood Campus to deliver an envelope containing a 6,000-signature petition circulated by a coalition of faculty which calls on Hopkins to abolish, not pause, the planned police force. 

As of last week, hundreds of faculty from across the university had signed the petition, as well as almost 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, over 2,000 alumni and over 1,000 Baltimore residents. Over 50 groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the ACLU of Maryland, also endorsed the petition.

Outside Daniels’ house, protestors called on him to heed their demands, chanting, “Money for jobs, not police! Money for housing, not police!” 

The Baltimore Police Department’s Foxtrot helicopter flew overhead, briefly monitoring the 100 or so people. The petition, and a number of protest signs, were left on Daniel’s doorstep and taped to the front door and windows.

Hopkins President Ron Daniels announced the pause on June 12, three weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked an uprising against police violence across the country and broad public scrutiny of brutality and racism in policing. The decision follows two years of sustained opposition from a wide coalition of Hopkins and Baltimore community members who, among many organizing efforts, staged demonstrations at Hopkins with an unwavering demand: No private police. 

But while organizers view the pause as a minor victory—one gained through complex direct action including a sit-in which resulted in a number of students facing arrest—they also believe it is a tactic to dodge accountability and briefly placate critics whose arguments are now being mainstreamed as demands to “defund” or “abolish” police have replaced calls for simple reform.

In a statement to the Beat, Hopkins Assistant Vice President of External Relations Karen Lancaster wrote that the university is committed to being a leader in police reform.

“It is clear to us that the conversation about policing in this country is undergoing a fundamental shift,” Lancaster wrote. “Continuing to move forward at this time, without the benefit of the conversations, debates and reforms that will take place during the next two years, would do a profound disservice to our institution and our community.”

Chisom Okereke, a class of 2019 alumna who, as president of the Black Student Union (BSU), was involved in organizing protests against private police, expects the university to pick up where it left off once protests ease up and the students who originally organized the opposition graduate.

“Hopkins is an institution that will do what is in Hopkins’ best interest,” Okereke said. “It’s hard, seeing how the last two years with the police force have gone, to believe that it’s not optics for them.”

Participants in The Garland Sit-In and Occupation, a 35-day sit-in staged in Garland Hall, the university’s primary administrative building during April and May of 2019, condemned Hopkins for failing to value the safety of Black and brown students and Baltimoreans. They oppose policing of any kind, and are not willing to negotiate reforms for a police force that doesn’t even exist (the Beat has granted some of these participants anonymity due to Hopkins threatening discipline and even expulsion).

“They announced this delay not because they were listening to students, staff and faculty,” one participant told The Beat. “They’re just very good at PR and don’t want to look bad to the international community, especially with all these protests.”

Another described the delay as “opportunistic,” adding: “None of these statements made public by leadership actually show any kind of deep engagement with racial and structural equity on campus.”

Community organizer Tawanda Jones, whose brother Tyrone West was killed by Baltimore Police and Morgan State University police in 2013,  said Hopkins should have hit the pause button during the sit-in, if not before.

“They didn’t listen to us at all. We weren’t respected. They mistreated us, and now we’re supposed to buy this? No,” Jones said. “Police had my brother in a George Floyd situation back in 2013, and here we are in 2020. Do we need more police? Hell no we don’t.”

Jones organizes West Wednesday, a weekly series of demonstrations demanding justice for her brother Tyrone West. The Garland Sit-In and Occupation took up justice for Tyrone West as one of three core demands, alongside abolishing the private police and ending the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When they expired last fall, the university did not renew its contracts with ICE.

Judah Adashi, a member of the music composition faculty at Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute, was among the faculty who circulated the most recent petition. Adashi said Baltimore’s recent history of brutal policing, including the deaths of Tyrone West and Freddie Gray, should have given administrators reason enough to reconsider.

“The idea that Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six police officers five years ago would not provide a tipping point, and would not keep an initiative like this from getting off the ground, is just astonishing,” Adashi said. “We’re calling for the full abandonment of this initiative. We’re making it very clear that the pause that popped up as we were in this process is not a sufficient response to that call.”

Johns Hopkins University announced plans to create a private police force for its Baltimore campuses in March 2018. A number of student group leaders met the night it was announced to create the Students Against Private Police (SAPP) coalition. They drafted a petition which circulated the next morning and garnered almost 1600 signatures in two days. Less than a week after the proposal, over 100 students and community members marched to Daniels’ house in protest.

Students continued organizing in the weeks that followed, testifying in Annapolis against two bills which would have authorized Hopkins to create the private force. In a meeting with some faculty and administrators in mid-March, Adashi asked whether the plan could possibly be walked back, given that the legislation hadn’t passed yet. The answer he was given, he said, was, “that ship has sailed.”

Legislative deliberations of the bills halted at the end of March and organizers breathed a sigh of relief: “Seeing the swiftness and the effectiveness with which so many groups came together in opposition to the police force was just so incredible,” said Barae Hirsch, an early member of SAPP. “We felt the righteousness of that cause, and we also felt the power of organizing.”

The fight, it turned out, was far from over. Hopkins officials planned to gather more information and input on the proposal before introducing new bills in the 2019 legislative session. Hopkins officials established a number of community forums, which Hirsch criticized for being more like lectures where the case—and need—for a private police force was presented.

Okereke recalled attending a dinner with Daniels alongside a number of other Black students in November 2018, which she said devolved into him berating them.

“Any concern that we brought up about the police force was just shot down,” Okereke said. “Everything we’ve said has fallen on deaf ears and every conversation that they have invited us into — instead of an opportunity for discourse, it’s more of an opportunity for them to convince us on why they should have a police force.”

As new legislation was introduced in 2019, students continued to organize trips to testify in Annapolis. They also met with legislators whose support for the bills seemed uncertain. Despite the organizing, Maryland’s legislature passed Senate Bill 793, titled the “Community Safety and Strengthening Act,” on March 28, 2019.

According to Hopkins Assistant Vice President of External Relations Karen Lancaster, community engagement played a critical role in shaping final legislation that includes mechanisms for accountability, transparency and training. This would include training around implicit bias and de-escalation, publishing comprehensive data on policing practices and creating an accountability board of Hopkins affiliates and community members. 

The private police bill that passed also included commitments from the state and Hopkins to fund youth programs in the city. Those are not dependent on establishing a university police department and are not subject to the two-year pause.

“We have long advocated for a new accountable, transparent model of policing,” Lancaster wrote. “It is precisely for that reason that we opted to take a slow, deliberative and consultative approach to this endeavor, and to be sure we are building a department that exemplifies best practices in constitutional, community-oriented policing.” 

After weeks of lobbying and testifying ultimately failed to halt the legislation, organizers turned to direct action. About 30 students entered Garland Hall on April 3, 2019. They planned for a 24-hour sit-in, demanding a publicly-broadcast meeting with administrators. But administrators said they would not agree to these terms until the students left Garland. This created a stalemate.

The Garland Sit-In and Occupation emboldened opposition to the private police. The Student Government Association (SGA) passed a resolution supporting the demonstration on April 9, and a fact-finding report from the Homewood Faculty Assembly estimates that a few hundred students participated on a rotating basis. 

One participant said that the sit-in created a new sense of what Hopkins students could do when it comes to organizing and direct action.

“Students are ready to put their academic, professional and personal life on the line to fight for justice and equity on campus and in the community,” the participant said. “This is not an issue that just goes away once you get your silly piece of paper from the university. For me personally, I’m going to stay involved because I’ll outlast Daniels through this fight.”

That participant was one of four students arrested early in the morning of May 8, when administrators called in about 80 officers from the BPD, who broke through Garland’s glass doors and arrested students who refused to disperse. Though the charges were abated, administrators pressed forward with conduct hearings, which the participant said sought to make an example of students involved. They described an opaque investigation with arbitrary deadlines, which caused concerns about how the hearings would affect the students’ academic work. Though the students feared suspension or expulsion, they did not ultimately face these disciplinary actions.

Members of the Garland Sit-In and Occupation recalled a number of behaviors from Hopkins faculty and staff which gave them concerns about how a private police force would act towards students. On the first night of the demonstration, Director of Student Conduct Dana Broadnax took videos of sleeping participants with her personal cell phone and sent them to a group chat with other administrators, who would not assure demonstrators in writing that the videos had been deleted.

And on the final night, former Hopkins professor Daniel Povey attacked a number of protesters inside Garland. While protestors screamed for help, Hopkins security guards did not intervene, stating that their job was to protect Hopkins property. One participant filmed a guard grabbing them and knocking their phone out of their hand. They later reported the incident to the university’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), leading to another opaque investigation. 

According to that participant, OIE ultimately stated that the security officer in question had been disciplined, and recommended taking further concerns to the police. Povey was terminated later that summer and banned from the Hopkins campus.

Tawanda Jones decried the lack of accountability for actions taken against the private police protesters, but warned that speaking out against injustice often has dire consequences. She herself has faced threats, physical assault and had car tires slashed. During the sit-in, Hopkins representatives warned Jones that she might face legal consequences for “trespassing” if she joined the students in Garland Hall. She joined them anyway.

It was powerful, she said, to see a coalition of students working with community organizers and using their privilege at Hopkins to call for an end to the private police plan: “I felt compelled to let them know — don’t ease up,” Jones said. “You’re gonna lose a lot. This is not easy.”

While she will continue to organize, Jones worries that Hopkins will push a pro-police narrative on incoming students, who may see continued opposition as increasingly futile. 

The class of 2024 group chat has already been discussing the issue of policing at Hopkins, though, as well as the university’s strained history with Baltimore, according to an incoming freshman. Laís Santoro, a rising sophomore who has been involved in organizing on campus, recalled that Garland Hall was shut down when she visited campus before committing to Hopkins. She said that incoming freshmen have already asked her how to get informed and involved in opposing the private police.

“A lot of incoming freshmen are able to understand and contextualize this more, considering we have this uprising that’s going on and all these discussions about defunding police becoming mainstream,” Santoro said. “I’m hoping that over these next two years we can push Hopkins to just dispense with the idea.”

During the two-year pause period, Hopkins believes the university’s work in public health will inform discussion of police reforms on a national, state and local level. The university expects to benefit from “new norms and best practices,” including reexamining Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, which protects police from investigations into official conduct. 

Santoro urged Hopkins to go beyond the delay, which she called “performative,” working instead with communities to address public safety without more police: “There’s already been so much conversation, and the university knows where we stand,” she said. “The time is now. They want to be leaders in public health? The murder of Black people is a public health issue.”

Barae Hirsch criticized framing the decision as a response to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. From the start, she said, administrators made it clear that they do not value Black lives.

“If they did, they would have listened to their Black students, their Black staff, their Black faculty and their Black community members the first time [the private police force was opposed],” Hirsch said. “They would have listened to them and the people standing in solidarity with them when we said that there are other better, more comprehensive and more sustainable solutions for this perception of crime.”

Okereke said Black alumni should help keep current students engaged in organizing. She recalled Black alumni sharing their experiences with racism at Hopkins at the BSU’s annual alumni dinner, noting that their memories of the 60s, 70s and 80s mirror the experiences of Black students today.

“Hopkins made us feel like our experience as Black students didn’t matter, that we didn’t have a place on campus and that we couldn’t call Hopkins home,” she said. “Because that sentiment is so pervasive among Black alumni, I think the issue of private police will always be something that will call us back.”

Class of 2017 alumna Tiffany Onyejiaka saw a resurgence of student activism on campus during and after the Uprising following Freddie Gray’s death. She said that this activism laid the groundwork for sustainable organizing against the private police plan, with outgoing organizers handing over knowledge and experience to incoming students. Onyejiaka, who was the 2016-17 BSU president, said that local and national protests against policing led students to scrutinize the ways Hopkins perpetuated systemic racism. Police brutality, she added, is just one effect of this system.

“It’s one strain of racism, but there are others,” Onyejiaka said. “When you start paying more attention to the core of what it’s from, you start realizing that a lot of the core similarities that lead to stuff like police brutality are the kinds of things that we’re seeing in our institutions.”

She shared repeated instances of racial profiling from security during her time on campus and recalled incidents which were needlessly escalated by calling security officers. A private force, she added, would intensify the possible negative outcomes of these encounters.

“We intend to explore alternative approaches to public safety that allow us to reduce our reliance on sworn policing to the greatest extent possible,” wrote Assistant Vice President of External Relations Karen Lancaster.

This, she explained, largely means focusing on the university’s existing security operations, with training on implicit bias, crisis intervention and de-escalation to bring officers in line with the tenets of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Administrators will continue to consult with a student advisory committee for security and money set aside for the police force will be reinvested in reducing contract security to “build a critical mass” of Hopkins security personnel with the aforementioned training.

Kwame Alston, who was senior class president and BSU president when Hopkins announced the private police plan in March 2018, called on Hopkins to invest in new approaches to public safety, rather than layering reforms on existing security.

Alston was open to reforms amid scrutiny of police brutality following the Baltimore Uprising but as police killings nationwide remain constant or increase despite reforms, he fully supports abolition, both at Hopkins and nationwide: “After years of seeing that not working, I’m definitely an abolish the police type of person,” he said. “You cannot reform the system, so defunding is step one and abolishing is the end.”

A Baltimore native, Alston had several negative interactions with police and Hopkins security during his time on campus. In his freshman year, Hopkins security let BPD officers enter his dorm room without warning to question him about a home invasion which had occurred at his family’s home weeks earlier. Later that summer, as a program intern for Hop-In, which supports first generation and low income students, Hopkins security called BPD officers to escort Alston out of the Hop-In dorm after he stayed up with the students past curfew playing Super Smash Bros.

In his senior year, more than one security guard denied him entry to the BSU space in one of the freshman dorms. While he didn’t carry a Hopkins ID, he had a key to the space and logged into the online system to prove that he was a student. Despite this, one guard continued to insinuate that he wasn’t. One of these incidents occurred just weeks after Daniels promised him that a Hopkins police force would “get it right.”

“The only way to get rid of this type of institutionally-sponsored violence is to not have a police force,” Alston said. “I just distinctly know that I’ve experienced the violence of the system that they’re trying to implement, and I know that it’s not the answer.”

Rising sophomore Tomisin Longe, a Nigerian international student, said they first thought a private police force would keep campus safe. However, their opinion changed after listening to the concerns of protestors.

They said that many students of color share a sense that the decision to pause the private police force was not made with their safety in mind, or else the university would have heeded the calls of organizers to abandon the plan last year. 

“The natural course of action for the university, I would have thought, would be to back off and reevaluate what their stance was on policing,” Longe said. “Now would be the perfect time to just get rid of it, but they’re only pushing it back two years.”

Many have suggested that the two-year pause gives the university breathing room to deal with the financial impact of COVID-19. In her statement, Lancaster wrote that budgetary constraints and the decision to pause the police force are unrelated: “The decision to pause our efforts will not produce significant savings in the short term because the university will still need to budget for extensive security operations on our campuses,” Lancaster wrote. “The future JHPD was always contemplated as a small addition (about 100 people) to the overall security operation (around 1,100 people).”

Some have wondered whether the university’s search for a Vice President for Security was another factor in the decision to pause. Melissa Hyatt, a 20-year veteran of the BPD, took this position in April 2018 and left in the summer of 2019 to become the chief of police in Baltimore County. After her departure, Hopkins created a search committee to find her replacement. SGA Executive President Sam Mollin hopes to secure an SGA seat on that search committee, which only includes one undergraduate. 

Asked whether administrators would consider abandoning the plan, Lancaster wrote that they would work to make sure that the existing Hopkins security lives up to their aspirations for the private police force: “In making future determinations about the JHPD, we will continue to be guided and persuaded by the best available evidence for which interventions reduce violent crime in our communities in both the near term and long term, and which do so in ways that are consistent with our values as a university and community anchor,” Lancaster wrote.

Tawanda Jones said that if Hopkins wants to lead long-term solutions to crime in Baltimore, it should reinvest the money for a police force into job creation programs.

“All the community wants is a fair chance, a fair opportunity, the same chance that they’ll give somebody with a different skin color. They want that same opportunity to have greatness,” she said. “I would never ask for more police, because right now every time you call 911 it’s like playing Russian roulette. You never know. At the end of the day, our lives are in their hands.”

Even if it’s not the full stop organizers have demanded since March 5, 2018, Kwame Alston counts the pause as a win.

“It’s not very often that organizers and activists win against a billion dollar corporation like Johns Hopkins,” he said. “It’s just a two year pause, but at the same time I was just really happy to celebrate any type of win, because that gives us two years to organize and shut this shit down.”

Additional reporting by Brandon Soderberg.

The post Abolish, Not Delay: Opposition to Proposed ‘Pause’ on Johns Hopkins Private Police Force Grows appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Steph Joyal saw the words posted outside Remington’s Church of the Guardian Angel — “UNDERCROFT FOR RENT.”

It was late 2017 and Joyal was a comedian working as a dog walker, but they had an idea which until that moment had been a more distant idea for them, like learning Japanese: To create an inclusive arts space which doubled as a community hub and avoided the many problems, organizationally and culturally, that marred many of the clubs and spaces around Baltimore.

“I’m just a random comedian who isn’t even out as trans yet being like we’ve gotta do something about these shitty, shitty venues,” they said, thinking back to summer 2016 when the idea was first percolating.

After seeing the sign, Joyal googled “undercroft” and found out that it’s a word that has been used since the middle ages to refer to a cellar or storage space beneath a church. When they reached out to the church to ask for a tour of the undercroft, they didn’t know what they’d find inside.

“I had no idea what was down here at all,” Joyal said. “I had no idea how big it was. I only saw the sign.”

A member of Guardian Angel’s vestry gave them a tour. What they found was a far cry from a weird little basement: A set of stone stairs beside the church’s main entrance lead down to a grassy courtyard. A mural on the exterior wall of the church depicted a city skyline and green mountains beneath a rainbow, a swirling sun and two angels in the sky. Inside, the walls were patterned blue and orange with pink trim. A brightly painted stage dominated one end of the basketball court-sized main room, bisected by wall that doesn’t quite fully stretch wall-to-wall.

The area was outfitted to be a daycare, complete with a kitchen and tiny, kid-sized toilets. Through a smaller carpeted room at the back, there was a dark, grimy storage room with rotting floorboards which was probably closest to the weird little basement Joyal expected.

For years, Joyal had been frustrated with venues that struggled to deal with interpersonal conflicts, problems with safety, sexual assault, and discrimination. More recently, they had come to realize that if they wanted to find a venue that matched their commitment to accessibility and inclusion, they’d have to open their own.

This space seemed like the right one.

Joyal pitched a plan to the Church of the Guardian Angel for a music venue that was also a way to expand community resources.

“I wanted to create a space that would fill the genuine needs of the community,” Joyal told me as they lugged music equipment around to tidy up the carpeted back room. “Trans people need safe space. People who don’t have money need space. Working families need space.”

They didn’t forget about daycare, though — that would operate there in during the day. At the time, one of Joyal’s dog walking clients was Angie Schaffer, a Remington native who had recently moved back to Baltimore with her husband and two kids after working in Brooklyn and D.C. While the two were chatting one day, Joyal started telling her about their idea for the space beneath Guardian Angel.

“I think I’m supposed to talk to you about that,” Schaffer told Joyal.

Schaffer, it turned out, needed somewhere for Red Wagon, her family meeting and play space for young children and parents to meet, talk, and learn together. There had been a few pilot launches for Red Wagon around Baltimore, but Schaffer was looking for somewhere more permanent. She wanted to set up a cooperative daycare where parents could take turns watching the kids while the other parents worked nearby. Red Wagon, even in its early phases, was shown to be as much a place for parents as kid.

“As much as kids need a place to be, parents also need a place to come and socialize,” Schaffer said. “We wanted to make people feel like there’s a place for families with young kids in the city.”

The day time daycare side of Joyal’s vision was in place—and because the church had used it as a daycare before, it had already passed inspection and had signs over emergency exits, push bar doors and a fire alarm system.  Within a month of Joyal’s tour, they presented a written business proposal to Guardian Angel’s vestry, including plans for funding though that wasn’t yet in place.

“They definitely put a lot of trust in me and gave me financial support by setting a rent within reach,” Joyal said.

Guardian Angel’s Pastor Alice Basset-Jellema considers the Undercroft part of the church’s efforts to make the church a community center for Remington — an addition to what Basset-Jellema called “standard church things” Guardian Angel does to make an inclusive and welcoming space, such as the church’s food pantry, thrift shop, and homework club.

As Remington has gentrified, Basset-Jellema explained, she has seen an increasing divide between longtime residents and those who have recently moved to the neighborhood. Though these groups often hold one another at arm’s length, Basset-Jellema said, she wants to bring them together.

“If we’re trying to heal the country, heal the city and heal the neighborhood, we’ve got to find ways for people from each economic identity to interact with each other in a neutral way,” she said. “We’re trying to make it a safe and welcoming place for everybody.”

Joyal had no funding yet, no experience running a DIY venue, and really, no partners to help bring their vision to life. Then a friend introduced them to Chris Belkas, a member of Charm City Arts Space (CCAS), an all-ages, volunteer-run venue which closed after 13 years in 2015.

After CCAS closed, Belkas worked with fellow CCAS member Sean McFarland to start a new organization, but they struggled to find a venue that was big enough with low enough rent. Joyal wanted to learn more about Belkas’ experiences at CCAS so that they would have a better idea of how to go about opening their own venue.

In 2009, before both Belkas and McFarland were part of CCAS, a CCAS member alleged that they had been abused and their consent violated by another member. According to Belkas, CCAS didn’t have a clear plan in place to respond to the situation. Many in the scene said the space mishandled it (for details on CCAS’ history and the 2009 incident, read founding CCAS member Jes Skolnik’s “An Elegy For Charm City Art Space”). The eventual end result of this public reckoning—years before #MeToo finally made the public at-large aware of these institutional issues—was that CCAS became part of Hollaback Baltimore’s Safer Space Campaign, publicly committing to ending harassment against women, LGBTQ+ folks, and facilitating a safe space.

“Sometimes the best way to learn how things work is to be a part of them when they don’t work,” Joyal said.

Belkas and McFarland explained that when they sought to open a new space, it was important for to establish a clear set of policies about how to address these conflicts that he and his fellow members agreed upon. They would build on the lessons learned at CCAS.

“We aren’t going to be dragging our feet and questioning what we should and shouldn’t do. We need something in place that we can easily follow — an action plan,” Belkas said. “It’s important, while we’re asking people for money and putting ourselves more out into the community, that we have these kind of things in place.”

Joyal and Belkas arranged to meet at Common Ground in Hampden and the encounter felt profound.

“We were sitting in the back room and the walls were empty, and somebody was like, hanging a new art show,” Joyal said. “Chris was like, ‘I just want to point out I think it’s very serendipitous that over the course of our conversation about building a space, the room we’ve been sitting in has suddenly been filled with art.’”

Belkas agreed to get involved. McFarland came on board with Belkas soon after, and with Joyal, Belkas and McFarland working together, The Undercroft Collective was born.

In just a few months, they worked to transform the interior of The Undercroft. They painted over the bright colors around the stage with black and white and created wall panels on wheels to close off the daycare in the evenings. They turned the carpeted back room into a practice space. Joyal’s friend Corynne Ostermann, a local artist and designer and member of the band Natural Velvet, donated a dozen 4×8 wood panels painted with a maximalist floral design which she had created as a backdrop in the music video for Micah E. Wood’s “Club Song.”

“I’d primed the stage grey to just neutralize the daycare colors, and it looked boring,” Joyal said. “I had these floral panels sitting in the back, so I just put a couple of them on the stage as a temporary solution and people fell in love with them immediately.”

Things moved quickly from there. Red Wagon moved into the space in June, and they began renting the practice room out for band rehearsals around the same time. Punx Picnic in early July was The Undercroft’s first booked show. A couple of the musicians who used the practice space were also involved with organizing Punx Picnic, Joyal explained and The Undercroft was able to host the second night of the festival.

A couple of weeks after Punx Picnic, The Undercroft hosted punk band Santa Librada for the launch of their latest record “Something to Say.” It was the first day of Artscape at the peak of July, and it was hot and stuffy inside The Undercroft.

“We had this really awesome, loud, very sweaty queer rock show,” Santa Librada frontwoman Rahne Alexander said.

A sweaty, queer rock show was certainly a marker for success for The Undercroft. Alexander had known about The Undercroft early on: Joyal spoke with her about the idea before even finding the space, identifying the need for an inclusive space like The Undercroft in Baltimore.

“There was plenty of room for the establishment of a place that was welcoming, especially to gender variant folks, queer folks and other marginalized people,” Alexander said.

Alexander said that The Undercroft could fill some of the space left in Baltimore’s arts scene after The Bell Foundry— an enclave for queer artists and artists of color—closed in December 2016. The city shut down The Bell Foundry citing code violations just days after 36 died in a fire at Ghost Ship, a similar arts space in Oakland. The Ghost Ship fire also kicked off an attack by right wing trolls reporting DIY and underground arts spaces across the country for code violations. The Undercroft then, is an attempt at bringing spaces in Baltimore for local arts communities back.

“After Ghost Ship burned down in Oakland, neo-Nazi trolls started looking up the addresses of DIY venues and reporting them to the city inspectors, so people were getting evicted, places were getting shut down, and people were essentially not running shows anymore,” Joyal said. “And so I knew that people needed a performance space and I figured we could get more volunteer community involvement in, or more involvement in community work and not just lip service activism if we were able to provide a resource to people.”

“In terms of what the space can do and in terms of its ethos, it’s able to provide something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Baltimore currently,” Alexander said.

The Undercroft occupies a liminal space — run like a DIY venue but with all of the proper permits and administrative structure, McFarland said: “Where we sit is maintaining our DIY collective ethos but bringing a more rigorous, systematic approach to the way that those things are typically handled. It’s not often that a DIY arts collective gets a federal tax ID, right?”

The Undercroft is also a sober, all-ages space, making it more accessible to a larger community.

“If you don’t have anything to do that’s fun and late on the weekend until you’re 21, that’s not really the best thing for kids,” Schaffer said. “Steph’s vision of the dry DIY venue for everyone — seriously everyone — takes it a step further.”

Schaffer noted a contrast between the people who use the space for Red Wagon — young parents, caretakers and even grandparents — and those who typically use The Undercroft as an arts space — mostly a younger crowd. Creating a space for that diversity is important in Baltimore, Schaffer said: “It sort of purposefully gets people together that might otherwise not have any opportunities in the natural course of their days to actually get together and talk with each other.”

At a show in February, that crowd filled the space in front of the stage, buzzing with chatter as they waited for the show to start. They’d come to see four local groups — Gloop, Leisure Sport, Manners Manners and Strange Attractor. As the few dozen folks milled about waiting for the performance to start, audience members gushed about the brightly painted floral panels, poked their heads back to check out Red Wagon’s daycare space or dropped their bags and jackets on the row of plastic elementary school chairs along the back wall.

Joyal kicked off the show by climbing on stage with a few reminders — including the no drinking rule. With the house lights down, a soft yellow glow bathed the stage in warmth and Gloop’s Dominic Gianninoto leaned into the mic and paused before strumming a single psychedelic chord to say, “Thanks for hanging out.”

The vibe, in a word: welcoming.

“It’s like a big home — the hominess of your living room,” Grace White, a member of local music collective Strange Attractor said that evening at the show. “I would bring my parents here. I’d also bring my kids here, but it still has the essence of Baltimore DIY.”

Along with shows, The Undercroft has hosted a clothing swap, a collaborative art workshop, a reading by trans science fiction author Otter Lieffe and an class on understanding the vital signs, among other programs. The number one long-term goal for The Undercroft is full physical accessibility—they’re planning to work with the church to get the grant money for an elevator.

“That would radically change the way the space exists while maintaining the ethic that we currently have,” McFarland said.

Belkas, Joyal and McFarland are this for the long haul. McFarland, who is looking to pursue a doctorate in music, only applied to schools in Maryland so that he would be able to stay and work with the space.

“It’s the furthest step I’ve ever taken towards doing this kind of work that I want to do, so I’d like to keep doing it,” McFarland said. “It’s very important to me.”

Joyal said that they would eventually transition to a membership model, which would hopefully encourage people to invest in The Undercroft not just financially but personally. A membership model would help The Undercroft make sure that everyone who wanted to get more involved shared the same commitment to the ideals of the space.

“We could give more to people coming into the space because they feel that they will be heard,” Joyal said. “A membership model would be a step towards building a community culture here that is a healthier discourse.”

They is also a list of documents to be written, including an expanded mission statement, a sobriety policy for events, guidelines for volunteer training and others.

Joyal returned to their commitment to providing an accessible and inclusive space not just for artists but everyone in the community. Much-needed community resources, they said, would ensure that The Undercroft offered more than just “lip-service activism.”

“I wanted to see a space exist where, one: you encouraged an environment, you built a community that didn’t engender discriminatory behavior,” they said. “But also a space where you expect conflict because there will always be conflict and in that spirit you would be able to have a way of dealing with it.”

Joyal and McFarland, had been dragging a speaker across the practice room’s thin carpet. They paused to consider whether founding The Undercroft was a form of activism.

“Activist-leaning?” McFarland answered.

“It’s a political statement to have a sober, all-ages, volunteer-run venue founded by a trans person in an extremely liberal church,” Joyal said. “Nothing is apolitical. Our existence is political.”

On March 30 at 7 p.m., The Undercroft hosts “Steph + Marcy Host To Host,” a fundraising event and celebration featuring stand up comedy and live music.

Baltimore Beat relies on support from readers. If you like the work we do, have not already subscribed, and have a few bucks to spare please subscribe to our Patreon.

The post Our Existence Is Political: The Undercroft, a sober, all-ages venue builds community in Remington appeared first on Baltimore Beat.