Mess up and mix up in market limbo

On Monday, instead of getting the last bits of gear for the event organized, we suddenly found out we are in major trouble with the site owner. Early on, after he already had agreed verbally to our event, I had sent him a text message to inform him of the support of the council and our event date. He (as I found out now) didn’t like the way I did this and decided to simply not respond, but I booked it under ‘Didn’t say no, will follow up later…’ and forgot about it all while we were getting busy with other details.

I got yelled at on the phone about not having his final authorization, which is not a nice experience for someone who is already really phone-phobic on the best of days. I believe I could make out ‘we still would like to help’ and ‘agreement still on’ between ‘THIS IS NOT DONE LIKE THIS’ and ‘AN EXTREMELY UNPROFESSIONAL WAY OF HANDLING THINGS’ and a lot I couldn’t really understand. It reminds me that this project is to build a future where you don’t have to beg to people who have more properties than they can care for. But as things are, I had to admit I should have followed up with him, had to write a very polite email describing our event and project in detail.

At the same time me and bf had to agree we don’t really like the idea of having to make the site safe. It’s a bit of a nightmare in more spots than we had initially realized. Also, the lack of tree shade and natural surroundings seems too off-putting for quite a few of the market people, and we also have had feedback that people would like to have regular markets.

So we’ve decided to take the market serious as its own thing. I composed another email to the council asking for a better spot (the prime recreational spot in the area). Said we would like to talk about regular markets, and could have an association in place tomorrow to more easily formalize any support from them. We’ve also, just for ourselves, lined up a few other alternative sites. Something will turn up. We had a talk about the anxiety that comes with all this, and concluded we still lighthearted enough about the whole thing, and will just stubbornly continue to organize, apart from Monday when my period doomsday coincided with the sudden site trouble and I spent the day crying about a range of different matters, as expected.

After a few anxiety-filled days with a market floating in empty space (while still receiving registrations for stands), we got answers from both the original site owner and the council. Council wants to meet us again and make us a proposal. Get the wedding party started. They did not tell us what the proposal is, so now we enjoy a few forced days off, slightly nervous, but we welcome the opportunity to imagine in more detail what we want to dream up here - markets, coop, a permanent space for both projects … after talking to so many different people out there we now know more about what would be interesting and helpful for people, and what we would personally like to be involved in.

We went to a meeting of another group wanting to set up a cooperative. The question keeps floating in the room: start with one larger cooperative or several small ones? Knowing that it is difficult for most people to work together even in small groups (I explain it with the fact that we all are re-learning how to work self-organized in community) I tend to favour starting with smaller groups. For now, we all seem to be studying, learning and stretching out feelers in different directions to find out what each person wants from a coop, which doesn’t always coincide. It’s good to find this out before sitting in an already existing coop together, so I tend to prefer wanting to meet more people and different combinations of smaller groups during the next few months, to find out who vibes together, which isn’t always obvious. Taking it slow but steady in this phase, learning together but not stubbornly insisting in walking towards one or many coops right now, we might end up with a reasonable number of stable coops with the right people working together. Imagine the positive boost for a region where more and more people work together democratically and self-organize.