Care-A-Vans
Hello! Would you mind introducing yourselves?
Hi! No problem! We’re the drivers for Norman Care-A-Vans. We’ll introduce ourselves briefly while also telling a bit about the history of the organization.
Russell Rice has been around from the very beginning. His connections with folks on City Council really paved the way for creating Care-A-Vans. In 2020 or so, the City had commissioned a strategic plan to end homelessness in Norman. Part of the plan involved providing transportation for unhoused folks. Since Russell was deeply involved in homeless advocacy, some council members approached him about developing a local nonprofit to address this issue. Russell worked closely with another founder of ours, Harold (who has since moved: we love you and miss you, Harold!) to get things off the ground. So soon Care-A-Vans was born.
Alan Hatcher has been driving with us since the beginning. Like the other folks who founded Care-A-Vans, Alan got started building community with unhoused folks through SILN, an organization that delivered home-cooked meals to unhoused folks in town. Everyone who drove for SILN already knew very well what City had paid consultants a stupid amount to tell them: that transportation was a need for our friends. During deliveries folks kept asking for rides to doctor's appointments and the like. Since the funding strings were dangled by the City, Russell and Harold invited Alan to join them in creating Norman Care-A-Vans.
Steve Lett got involved with Norman Care-A-Vans right after the organization was incorporated. He had moved to Norman in July 2021 and quickly got plugged into Red Dirt Collective and their organizing work going on in town. This led him to get involved in building Care-A-Vans at the turn of 2021/2022 just when things were taking off. He’s been driving and doing lots of behind the scenes work for us since.
Mike Davidson joined us in late 2022 after seeing us in the news protesting the destruction of our friend’s homes in the woods by Crest. Those woods have sadly long since been bulldozed to make room for more parking and box stores (which haven’t been built yet). That happened back in July of 2022, right after the City had abruptly closed the only low barrier shelter in town. That was a rough summer. But Mike loved our very vocal approach to advocating for the folks we work with, so he jumped on board and actually became our first employee starting at the beginning of 2023.
Max Geiszler joined us as a regular driver during the fall of last year. He’s a philosophy student at OU and learned about us through Steve Ellis, one of his professors who has also been on our Board of Directors from the start. Like everyone, Max started by doing meal deliveries, and has just recently started driving for our shuttle service.
We should say that we’re always open for more folks to join us! So hit us up if you’re interested in helping out! Just shoot an email to us at ncvoutreach@gmail.com
Anything in particular you've been working on?
Our biggest ongoing project is making Care-A-Vans sustainable. When we started this, we hoped money wouldn’t be a huge issue because we were hoping to get a City contract. So the initial goal was simply to create the organization that would receive money the City of Norman set aside in 2021 following abolitionist demands to fund care, not cops. The City had decided that money would go to unhoused transportation, so we built Care-A-Vans and started operations in hopes of getting that money. Several months later, after the city put out its Request for Proposals for the project, we applied. We were the only applicants. But in the end the City decided to give the money to no one. That sucked. Another awful part of the summer of 2022. Though the city decided we didn’t deserve to be funded, their Human Rights Commission did give us their Human Rights Award that year—a nice gesture with no money. (We were a little saucy in our acceptance speech.)
Anyway, since we didn’t get City money, we’ve had to figure out how the hell to raise funds to keep this going. Doing the work is the easy part. So easy. Making it a sustainably funded thing is made ridiculously hard. This is, of course, on purpose in our horrifyingly careless capitalist world. And we’re still trying to figure it out. It’s an ongoing struggle. But we believe that both what we do and how we do it is valuable. So we keep plugging along, trying to raise funds while also performing our values as much as possible—both through internal policies and our external messaging.
Other projects you see happening around that are cool?
There’s so many beautiful projects going on. We developed out of Red Dirt Collective, so we’re always loving seeing what they’re up to: mutual aid fairs, their community garden, tenant organizing, community conversations, and such. They are awesome folks.
We love SHRED the Stigma, a harm reduction org based in OKC. We head up to OKC and assemble harm reduction kits with them every other week and distribute them in Norman. The work they do is saving so many lives. We love being a part of it.
Other cool things include the labor organizing that’s always happening around us. A recent win that we were excited to learn about is the new union of workers at Natural Grocers: NG Community United.
There are also so many cool citizen driven groups that have been engaging in direct democracy and mutual aid—from the broad coalition of Normanites that regularly advocate for our unhoused friends at city hall, to the folks that keep our many free pantries and fridges stocked and operational.
What music do y’all listen to on the road?
Each of us has a different approach. We all deeply care about music and think a lot about the kinds of space it makes.
Steve: My approach is to simply play the radio and toggle between stations when commercials come on. It’s not really the music I listen to on my own. But because many folks recognize the music played on the radio, it lends itself to recollections that lead to great stories. And of course, we’ve also had some epic sing-a-longs with bangers like Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License.” Basically I stick with music familiar to folks in hopes of building relationships through shared and sharing musical experiences.
Mike: Rolling up at A Friend's House in the morning with some good tunes and a strong cup of coffee is becoming my favorite part of the day and has led me back to having a small renaissance with the music I was raised on. My playlist varies, but leans heavily into classic blues, soul and rock n roll. Some personal favorites while driving are Otis Redding, Little Feat, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. If there’s laughter and singing on the bus, I’m a pretty happy guy. Music is an incredible universal connector, and a bus load of folks singing “The Joker” by Steve Miller Band, as we slip down Main St at 7:20am is a pretty magical example of that!
Alan: I enjoy finding and creating playlists of interesting genres that I'm less familiar with and seeing what our friends vibe with. I'll admit that this can occasionally be a polarizing approach and the phrase "Alan, what the hell are you listening to?!" has definitely been said more than once, but I think overall everyone has fun hearing some music you don’t hear on most radio stations. I had a Dub Reggae playlist with artists like King Tubby, Scientist, and Lee "Scratch" Perry going strong for quite a while last year, which a lot of folks were digging. Musically, I think Dub’s slow rhythms, deep and full bass frequencies, and use of the echo effect create a peaceful mood in the vehicle, and the themes of spirituality, struggle, unity, and liberation seem to resonate as well. Some other recent favorites have been a few playlists by the Numero Group record label, one called "Private Beach: The Numero Group Guide to Surf," which is full of super vibey old surf rock instrumentals, (including a song called "Caravan" by the group The Caravans, which always gives me a cheeky grin when it comes on), and another called "Country Dreamin'," which contains classic country songs, many of which explore social issues such as poverty, incarceration, substance use, labor exploitation, gender roles, and mental illness in a way that feels honest and direct, with a compassionate sense of humor, and always on the side of the downtrodden and brokenhearted. Sometimes we'll do some traveling around the world and back in time through compilations of Turkish Psych, Cambodian Garage, Peruvian Cumbia, Nigerian Funk, Soviet Disco, Ethiopian Jazz, French Yé-yé, Italian film scores, and the list goes on. Lately we've ended up back into more familiar punk and indie territory with The Clash and The B-52's, as well as a visit to New Orleans via the Funk icons The Meters and the "Queen of New Orleans Soul," Irma Thomas. Being able to share my love of music is one of my favorite parts of driving for Care-A-Vans.
Any stories you want to share?
For sure! We’ll hand this over to Lauri, one of our friends who stays at A Friend’s House, the shelter in town. We published this in our first issue of our community journal The Dispatch, which is going to be shipped with every merch order from this pre-order!
Any favorite poems recently?
Currently we’re working on putting together the second issue of The Dispatch. In that issue we are excited to be publishing two poems from one of our long-time friends, Dawn. So keep an eye out for that coming out sometimes this fall!
Follow us on Facebook or Instagram to get the news of when it’s out!
Any other future things you‘re looking forward to?
Oh yes! We are looking forward to living in a world where everyone is able to readily care for one another: abolitionist futures. We understand our work to be part of building some organizational infrastructure to make such a future possible. Of course, it’s a massive uphill battle because this world’s powerful careless, violent institutions seek to foreclose our capacity to care. So we look forward to a future where we can care-take with ease, where resources aren’t hoarded, and where tending to all our relations animates all institutional forms. This means, among other things, the abolition of capitalism, returning land to Indigenous sovereignty, and smashing the heteropatriarchy.
While this is a future we are looking forward to, we should also point out that this future is both already present and has a long history. We are here, after all, as are so many others around the world. But these vibrant histories and insurgent presents are violently suppressed in order to naturalize life-destroying carelessness. So we try to counter that bullshit by being as loud as possible about how there are actually life-affirming ways of dwelling, relating, and producing in the world. And we are always trying to perform this through our work.
Anything else?
Nah, we gotta get back out on the road! But before signing off, we just want to send our love to you, Eric and Jenna, at Oscillator Press. We are so happy to have an awesome print shop here in town that supports local artists. Much love. And take care.
