Beverly Brown
1951-2005
Many people knew Beverly through her gardens. She took such pleasure digging her fingers through the soil, caring for budding plants, delighting in the mix of beauty and utility of the living things she nurtured.
I treasure those moments we shared together in the garden, as she taught me to work the earth and care for its bounty. But how I first came to know Bev was through her planting seeds of a different kind, in her work with rural communities through the Jefferson Center.
Bev founded the Jefferson Center for Education and Research back in 1994 with the vision of providing an opportunity for rural working people to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to make change in their communities. Having grown up in a rural area herself, always hungry for knowledge and a chance to share her ideas and dialogue with others, Bev knew firsthand the isolation and disempowerment that people in rural areas can experience.
Beverly had come to Highlander in 1986 as an intern. She spent time with Myles, with Highlander staff, she traveled to Appalachia and the South, learned about culture and music and sit in on Highlander workshops. After almost a year at Highlander, she decided to do back to rural Oregon and begin to put to use what she had learned that she thought would be helpful in the rural Pacific Northwest.
As she once explained,
Imagine if you were living in an isolated rural town. Little access to books or theaters or discussion groups and seminars. All your life, you have been led to believe that your opinions didn't matter. People referred to your folk as ignorant, backwards. Suddenly somebody shows up at your door and invites you to sit down at the table to talk about your life. Wants to hear what you think about what is happening in your community, in your job. She tells you there are others interested in what you have to say; people in other communities who are experiencing many of the same things, people willing to work together to make their communities a better place. And she invites you to come to a gathering to meet them and to share your story.
That's what Bev did through the Jefferson Center. She gave rural working people the chance, the permission, in a sense, to do what they so rarely have the opportunity to do - to really take their life stories and experiences and analyze them, make sense of them as they relate to politics and economics and the social history of a place and a community and a region. She recognized the importance of knowledge based on experience and helped rural workers create new knowledge - knowledge to serve them in bettering their working conditions and their communities.
In that way, Bev planted seeds of hope. Seeds of possibility, in places and communities that are usually forgotten, ignored, or worse, written off as impossible.
Sarah Loose, Executive Director of the Jefferson Center
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