Meet the Maker: Ian Hunt

Hi, I’m Ian Hunt, the creator of the Universal Community Today. 

I began a journey in People’s Park in 2020 which has led me to create a new community service entity in Berkeley, California. I lived in the park after becoming displaced during the pandemic for a while and met a community of disparate souls who for various reasons had all taken refuge there and we all witnessed it’s destruction firsthand together. During that time I leveraged the housing opportunities that were available and obtained permanent housing, and I specifically picked out an apartment a block away from where all my old friends were still living in tents. In the final days of the park from 2022-2024. I began bringing home pieces of the historic wood that were being taken away and turned in to mulch from the park to my new place every day. I got carried away with the amount of great looking potential walking sticks, wands, chunks of the trees carved out as they were felled, a whole redwood slice, and a variety of interesting artifacts unearthed from the ground. During this time I was in collaboration with all the various groups wanting to save the park, the broke students who wanted food and housing, the hippies who had been there since the beginning, and those with real mental health issues who had essentially been living there with permission from the City and University for many years.  We couldn’t overcome the University and the City and well, we fought real hard and we lost (real hard)!

I stockpiled the wood for two years, sorted, cleaned and initially sanded each piece, and have now curated it into a collection of dry usable pieces, given a few nice finished works away to park elders and friends, and now I have this collection of very historic and powerful crafting materials. My goal here is to help maintain the legacy of People’s Park, it’s fundamental message of empowerment to the world as the birthplace of the counter-culture revolution and its history of communal gathering and mutual support as best I can by bringing food, music, art and theater to the original park space and it’s surrounding neighborhood, which has always been a gathering place for the vibrant community of the UC Berkeley Campus main pedestrian area (the core issue here, really).

Imagine a professor of 20 plus years walking through and asking me what the heck happened to my park? Or a senior woman leaping out of her van and crying on my shoulder because the tree where she feel in love with her husband under was a stump now? (that was the Fig tree), and a hundred other stories of survival, redemption, and tragedy.

It is my honor to preserve the memory of the stage that Bob Dylan sang on, the ecosystem that the National Park Service declared under protection, the original stewards of that land who left behind traces of activity there, and the incredible group of artists, fools, musicians and cultural conservationists I am proud to call my friends today. 

The Park was created after an unarmed protestor was shot and killed by American troops on Telegraph Avenue during a time of terrible social injustice in American history which I would have thought would have been enough for our country. Sadly, we are still right where we were then in so many ways I am just going to look for the rainbow ahead.

But as I witness the killings of unarmed demonstrators in our country today, and the treatment of all the lower income social classes in America getting steadily worse, I just have to do something. 

The old park is opening as student housing next year and I have already collaborated with the University to cooperatively use the historic space within their established green space guidelines so that when the new students arrive and meet all the old hippies every year we can all share stories and songs and make tye-dyes and have a picnic and play chess again.  Nicely, with no police intervention required. I am also working to liaison as the City is voting how to build a brand new housing and resource center right on the grounds, next to the student building and this will need supervision as it goes through the City’s bureaucracy.

At this point I am asking for your support to keep the community alive during the worst budget crisis the City of Berkeley has faced in 20 years, things are desperate, all the old local community centers are closing and as a member of the Berkeley Behavioral Heath Commission I am in communication with City Council and have sat through the presentations where they announced all the budget cuts.  

The best we can do is centralize the grassroots organizations that survive the economic purge we are about to get hit with county-wide, and make a list of all the available resources and keep it current and accessible to everyone, which I am in a perfect position to shoulder some of the responsibility for by investing my energy and love into the Universal Community Today.

How about it? Are you in? Membership is for everyone, and my goal is to expand our outreach around the city. Contributions are essential at this point to keep the project moving and I invite you to contact me directly for a bespoke consultation on whatever your idea might be. Ideas include key tags, coasters, jewelry stands, knife handle blanks, tool handles of any sort, raw material, beads, wands, rods, staves, chessboards, signage, laser engraving, pet memorials, vampire stakes, you get the idea…please check out the store.

Lastly, I am writing the history of the land and all of its inhabitants from the beginning as an epic tale of transformation, destruction, survival and continuing habitation and evolution into a working manuscript that tells the whole story of the land (Michener-style, with some  gives us some peace and closure and hopefully plants a few seeds for the next generation to grow up into planet-saving hippies. Introducing…

People’s Park – The Musical! There is a whole cast of characters ready to perform, and the UC Berkeley Theater Department has reached out me already, and the city loves this kind of publicity, so I am currently working on it. Stay tuned for more details on “Death of a Redwood” soon. The urban guerrilla gardening and social landscape that has always been there can still coexist and flourish with the right seeds and support from the local and global community. I envision a project where the City, it’s residents, teachers, and students can still all share a key piece of our shared global culture and learn to integrate the lessons of our past. By sharing food and art and music together as human beings like we always have in that place to turn our preserved heritage into something new and vibrant and grow loving toward another once again.

All we are saying…is give trees a chance.

Ian Hunt