Ben Aubin Photo
New Haven’s sending support to the growing anti-Wall Street protest in New York in the form of white crew socks — and an alternative-to-greed model of distributing merchandise.
That help is coming from organizers of New Haven’s Free Store. They’re working on setting up a Free Store outpost in Zuccotti Park — renamed “Liberty Park” by demonstrators who have occupied it over the past two weeks — to get needed items like clothing to the 300 – 700 people who are sleeping there, even in the rain. The idea is to build the on-site “store” into a self-sustaining enterprise that “sells” goods for free to the public at large in keeping with the larger theme of the protests.
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
That’s the goal of New Haven’s Ben Aubin (pictured). Aubin, a 26-year-old biofuels salesperson, founded New Haven’s Free Store earlier this year. He traveled to the New York “Occupy Wall Street” protests over the weekend. He brought 20 pairs of donated socks and scoped out what else organizers need for the burgeoning ranks of anti-corporate park occupiers in New York’s financial district. He started making arrangements with protest organizers to carve out a weatherproofed “Free Store” in the midst of Liberty Park, which organizers have subdivided into sections dedicated to, say, media, medical care, and book-sharing.
Aubin has been traveling back and forth between Liberty Park and New Haven. He was amid the thousands who demonstrated Saturday at the Brooklyn Bridge (pictured at the top of the story). He said he twice broke away from police lines when officers surrounded protesters and made mass arrests.
Aubin and other New Haven organizers are now meeting back here in town to finalize plans for the store and to explore how else to tap into the growing protests, which in the past two days have begun spreading to cities across the country as well as abroad.
“The intention would be to keep the occupiers supplied. It would also be a form of constructive direct action,” Aubin said Monday.
The protests center on the current economic crisis, on the role large corporations and sympathetic lawmakers and regulators have played in the rise in unemployment and foreclosures, the country’s increasing income/wealth gap, Wall Street corruption, agribusiness-sparked poisoning of the food supply, multi-million-dollar parachutes or bonuses to failing executives.
Ben Aubin Photo
The protests began small, two weeks and two days ago, in New York. They leaped to national attention this weekend after the arrest of 700 protesters in a march along the Brooklyn Bridge, and as the numbers of park occupiers swelled in New York and inspired similar actions from Boston to Baltimore to Chicago to Los Angeles to Montreal and many points in between. (Click here and here for more on that.) Organizers hope to ignite an American version of Tahir Square and the Arab Spring, channeling public outrage into a mass movement for change.
Church Street Spark
Aubin and colleagues opened New Haven’s Free Store in a temporary storefront on Church Street in June. The store’s mission, inspired by the 1960s-era San Francisco Diggers: for-profit, no-price commerce.
It quickly drew lines of customers out the door as well as legions of volunteers and donors. The idea was to get people stuff for free — but within a model that could ultimately pay for itself rather than rely on donations, through creative use of the web and other marketing techniques for special services. Click here to read all about that.
The Free Store lost its donated storefront on Aug. 1. Aubin and the other organizers are in the process of raising money and planning to reopen it in a new location.
Meanwhile, they’re diving into the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Aubin put out the word via Facebook and Twitter last week that he was making an initial visit to Liberty Square. He assembled a few bags of donations, including the socks and rain gear. “We had some stuff that was stored from the previous Free Store. New donations were made by people” who knew he was going, he said.
On Friday he checked out the square, gave organizers the donations to distribute, and began making plans with them to create the Free Store space. The initial goal is to keep the growing legions of protesters supplied; they’ve vowed to continue occupying the park and holding protests indefinitely.
Then the Free Store would have two other goals, according to Aubin: To develop a model that organizers can replicate in other cities to support their own spin-off protests. And to move free merchandise to New Yorkers in general from the Liberty Park spot, in the spirit of the underlying message of the protests themselves.
“Basically what you’re doing is a pattern interrupt,” Aubin said. “People’s pattern is work to create income and then use the income to acquire what your needs are. What this does is it allows for people to fulfill their needs free of money, which then allows for them to think of other possibilities of perhaps fulfilling what their needs are. If occupants were giving out items of perceived value to people of New York who are quite aware of the rat race, it would be a great way of marketing the positive side of [Occupy Wall Street] — which is basically a different way of organizing the economy so communities take care of each other.”
For information on how to make donations to the new Occupy Wall Street Free Store, email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).