My Blog

A Message from Steve Beuret on Barbara’s Care Pages

Yesterday,
at the end of an afternoon spent sleeping in her bed, Barbara died
peacefully. She’d been getting weaker and weaker and was increasingly
short of breath. A few hours earlier the hospice nurse had put her on
oxygen and told us all that Barbara had maybe a week or two left. For
her to die just hours later was a shock at first but also seemed like
exactly the sort of thing Barbara would do. She knew her body was spent
and it was time to go. Being Barbara, she made her exit in a graceful
and understated way. I can’t know what it was like for her but I like
to think that she made a choice. That she was both willful and
accepting to the very end.

Speaking for the extended family,
we’re all coping with both the emotional and practical aftermath of
this and much is still being processed. There will be a memorial
service in a few weeks but I don’t know when. We’ll set a date as
quickly as we can and post the details here. Barbara collected a lot of
friends during her life and they have been been a source of seemingly
limitless compassion during these difficult months. We’re all very
grateful.

Steve Beuret

The A-Space Collective sends
love and condolances to Books Through Bars, Contexts Art, the Life
Center Association, Friends General Conference and everyone else
touched by Barbar’s amazing and heartfelt work.

The A-Space Community Space
needs your on-going financial support.

The A-Space desperately needs to transition into financial sustainability. We
have been scraping by financially, but now we are really at a turning point.
We are looking for you and fifteen of your friends (and ours!) to give a
monthly donation, which will allow us to pay our rent, phone bill, and cover
maintenance costs. A little money will go a long way! If you sign up today to
give just $10 a month, it would really help the A-Space! With this type of
on-going financial support we will be able to free up our energy to focus on
event planning, outreach, and community building.

Without your support we will not be able to continue to function as the
community space you know and love. Remember: The A-Space provides free and
low cost space for community groups and events like Poems Not Prisons Open Mic,
Families and Communities After School Program, Adult Basic Ed Tutoring, Women’s
Improvisational Music Workshop, Harvest of the Soul/Satsang and more as well as
being a venue for anarchist meetings and events, art shows and a home to Books
Not Bars, Philly NORML, and Philly Icarus.

Please visit our website at http://www.the-aspace.org/donate to make a monthly
donation! If you scroll down you will see paypal buttons to donate a one time
amount, or monthly donations of $5, $10 or $20. There is also an option to
give $100 a year, using your credit card or paypal account

You can also make out a check to "4722 Association" with A-Space in
the memo line. Donations can be sent to

4722 Baltimore Avenue

, Phila PA 19143. To
drop by with a donation, check out the calendar on our website www.the-aspace.org and come by whenever
there is an event scheduled.

We appreciate your support!

The A-Space Collective

Our phone situation at the A-Space has been very sad. We could not afford to keep our voicemail. Someone donated an answering machine, but it didn’t work very well and recently disappeared.

We have wireless dsl that we share with Book Through Bars and the 4722 tenants. We’d like to get a voice over IP phone plan. There are some relatively inexpensive ones that include voicemail and long distance.

But we need serious help figuring out the hardware stuff.

Anyone smart about this kind of thing, and willing to help?

We’ll be your best friend!!

Thursday 1.18.2007:

We had our first round of "lets clean the a-space" yesterday. We had great volunteers and got three times more accomplished than some of us ever dreamed we could!

Special thanks to poems not prisons, books through bars, families & communities united, anarchist black cross and mothership for pitching in with this dusty project.

Saturday at 3:30pm we have a crew getting together to clean some more, and to continue re-arranging stuff to use our small space more efficiently.

Local folks should drop by and help! We promise lots of coffee and tea.

We might be giving away some furniture soon. send a message if you live nearby and might need small round tables or a giant bookshelf

Saturday 1.20.2007

Cleaning today was a major success! We had amazing volunteers from Books Through Bars and Poems Not Prisons. We cleaned out and re-arranged everything. It is a brand new A-Space– folks should come check it out.

The only thing left to do is clean out our closet. Maybe in February…

In other news: yesterday we booked our first event via MySpace– an Armed Metropolois show on May 20!

Sunday 1.21.2007:

A couple of collective members did sweeping, mopping and cleaned the counters and sinks today. We donated our big shelves to the fabulous Lava library– a collective member with a truck even volunteered to move them!

We set up clipboards for the email list and the calendars– 2007 is a whole new A-Space era. Stop in and check us out. If you come by in January you can still see the political prisoner poster show!