I’m a grandparent, poet, technologist, sometime activist, and a settler living on Salt Spring Island, unceded territory of the Quw’utsun Tribes (Cowichan), Spune’luxutth (Penelakut), BOḰEĆEN (Paquachin), MÁLEXEȽ (Malahat), SȾÁUTW̱ (Tsawout), W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip), and W̱SIḴEM (Tseycum) Nations. My pronouns are he/him/his.

Arts

I’ve always been active in the arts and often melded arts with activism and community engagement. A few highlights:

• Mounted a solo mock epic in verse, “The Trois-Rivieres Tales,” for the Victoria Fringe Festival, reprising it in Vancouver and on Salt Spring.
• Opened for the leftist troubadour David Rovics.
• Have had my poetry appear in publications like SubTerrain, Contemporary Verse 2, the New Verse News and various chapbooks.
• Organized and hosted SaltFest, a 2019 performance festival on Salt Spring Island.
• Hosted the monthly Poetry Open Mic at the Salt Spring Island Public Library.

For more on recent activities, see my 2022 interview with Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Nedjo Rogers.

More on this site:

• Poems
• Songs
• Writing

Schooling, activism, community service

At high school in Vancouver I was a student activist, joining anti-nuclear groups, participating in sit-ins to protest cutbacks in education funding, co-founding the political youth newspaper Next Generation.

As a university student, I led a 1990 solidarity delegation to Honduras, served at MOSAIC as a volunteer interpreter in Spanish and English for immigrants and refugees, did a degree in Latin American Studies and Spanish then an MA in geography. Through a detailed historical study of a transformative community garden near Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, my thesis Modern commons : place, nature, and revolution at the Strathcona Community Gardens, addressed the question “Do revived systems of local control have the potential to resolve modem social and ecological crises?”

After graduating and moving to Victoria, I remained active in Latin American solidarity as a member of Central America Support Committee and cofounded the Mining Justice Action Committee. During a five month stay in Nicaragua, I volunteered with a feminist health promotion organization. Later, on Salt Spring Island, I was a member of a group of parents of trans children and youth and, in the capacity of an ally, served on the organizing group for the fantastic Pride celebrations in 2019.

I chair the Ometepe-Gulf Islands Friendship Association, a group active in climate change solidarity through a decades-long partnership with farming cooperatives in Nicaragua.

Work

In my years working in the nonprofit sector, I provided clerical support at Early Childhood Educators of BC, was a community economic development planner at Victoria Street Community Association, and a youth program leader at Lifecyles, among other roles.

For seven years, I was a staffperson at the Environmental Mining Council of BC (EMCBC) where my colleagues and I worked to support communities on the receiving end of mineral development. We produced reports, drew up maps, presented workshops, travelled from our Victoria offices to interior communities where community members were grappling with new mine proposals or the impacts of operations abandoned decades earlier. We worked in partnership with the Tahltan First Nation in the Stikine, with the United Steelworkers at Trail. I went underground with union leaders at Myra Falls, grilled corporate executives at downtown Vancouver boardrooms, toured the slag heaps of the Sullivan, and travelled to Peru and Bolivia to meet with campesino communities that were facing down some of the same BC-based mining companies we knew at home.

It was at EMCBC that, step by step, I became an “accidental technologist,” taking on increasingly technical roles as our community support efforts identified new technical needs. I began first to use and then to contribute to free software projects. Before I knew it, I was working exclusively in nonprofit tech, specializing in the open source Drupal content management system.

In that role, I led technical projects for prominent (largely US-based) groups like the Smithsonian Institution and the AFL-CIO.

But, at the same time, I’ve always stayed close to the activist groups that brought me to tech in the first place. Working with my partner Rosemary Mann through our business Chocolate Lily, we produced Open Outreach, a free software platform that hundreds of groups have used for their organization websites; see this podcast interview. More recently, we teamed up with colleagues at the progressive tech coop Agaric to build the Drutopia project.

As well as writing code, I’ve had adventures in technical writing!

At its best, technology can be a useful support, but it in no way replaces the essential and generally unsung grassroots work of organizing and building community.

Life

I’m a lifelong cyclist, walker, and transit user; I’ve never had a driver’s license. Which, I’ll admit, has its occasional downsides, like when you’re four or five days into a road trip and can’t take a turn at the wheel, but overall I’ve never craved more than my trusty bike’s two wheels. These days one of my favourite things is long distance walking with Rosemary—see her website Walking Away.

Work-life balance is important to me. While my kids were small Rosemary and I both worked part time so we could share the work of home. Now we provide childcare for our granddaughter. What a delight!

During growing season I help out when I can at Rake and Radish, my twenty-something child Ardeo’s farm in Cadboro Bay, commuting there and back by bike and ferry.