Return of the CM

On Tuesday, February 25, 2020, students, faculty, and staff gathered in McGregor 113 as usual for Community Meeting. This meeting, however, had a special purpose—it was the first Community Manager Candidates Forum since 2007.

For decades, the Community Manager position (commonly known by the acronym CM in typical Antiochian fashion) played an important role in the structure of Antioch’s timehonored system of Community Governance. And now, the position was finally poised to be reinstated at the newly independent Antioch College.

One day prior to the Community Meeting, Noah Greer ’21—who had served as Community Council (ComCil) Co-Chair and was now in the interim role of Community Facilitator—sent out an email to the entire campus with a helpful guide for properly interviewing job candidates.

The meeting went as planned. After the customary announcements, updates, and expressions of gratitude, the CM candidates were welcomed to the front to introduce themselves and talk about how they would carry out tasks in the role of CM. All was calm and non-contentious. Then the question and answer round began. It quickly became clear that Noah’s guide was taken into great consideration as the questions asked during the forum were both challenging and tenacious. It was an unmistakably Antiochian session.

Following the meeting the choice of CM was put to a community vote, and Coco Gagnet ’18 was elected the first CM in more than a decade.

Following an unusual spring term where courses were conducted entirely online, Coco assumed the Community Manager position in August, 2020, as the College prepared to welcome students back to campus for fall.

Q+A with Coco Gagnet ’18

What did you do after graduating from Antioch in 2018?

“After graduation, I spent the summer working on a farm in Hotchkiss, CO. From there, I moved back to Ohio and worked as a baker for a while. During that time, I was able to build and launch a website for my experiential philosophy framework, Come Again (apologies, the site has not been updated for a bit). In August of 2019, I moved to Troy, NY, to work on a farm, and, in the winter I moved an hour south to Hudson, where I was working in the kitchen at a queer seafood restaurant, Lil’ Debs Oasis. I moved back to Ohio at the beginning of the pandemic, and now I’m back at Antioch.”

What is your definition of community?

“This question is really hard for me. In some ways, I think there’s some tension with using the word ‘community.’ I feel very aware of the ways it’s been commodified by neoliberal capitalism. I also think that the idea of community can be associated with a very particular structure of relations, or belonging, but that can be too deterministic. I’ve often heard folks at Antioch say ‘we don’t have community.’ I don’t think community is something you can ‘have,’ it’s not an object; it’s many practices. Sometimes we mistake The Institution for The Community. Antioch is an institution, a place, an idea, a group of people gathered. Practicing community has to be parsed out from these overlaps.

“I think about the philosophy of Dr. King and the “Beloved Community;” a utopian vision grounded in agape, a coming-together that values radical hospitality, love, justice, and all life sharing in the abundance of Earth. Ultimately, I think of community as the word we use to describe ‘being together,’ or more closely ‘figuring out how to be together.’ The kind of community practice I’m interested in is necessarily utopian, a process full of hope and risk and resilience, all in the service of taking care of one another and the Earth.”

What made you choose to apply to the Community Manager position?

“When I was in my fourth year at Antioch, I was a part of a governance restructuring body, ComCil B. The re-establishment of the Community Manager position was something I strongly advocated for in that group. It wasn’t necessarily a thought that came out of the historical precedent, but from witnessing the gaps in the functioning of the Antioch Community, and seeing the Community Manager as a person who could potentially bridge some of those gaps. I think CM is a unique position; I like that there’s so much space to shape the role. I like that there’s a lot of breadth. I’m interested in working for Antioch because it is the site of so many pivotal relationships, and I really work best when I have an emotional connection to what I’m doing (for better or worse). I think there’s an interesting tension in Antioch being a place of incredible nostalgia (for some), while also being a place of reinvention and movement. I sort of feel an alignment with that, an interest in cultivating something shared, and also a love of things being shaken out in movement; in giving ourselves permission to change.”

How do you deal with conflicts and difficult situations in community?

“I think I came into the world highly opinionated, and without much hesitance in expressing those opinions. However, time has really tempered the way I communicate, and cultivated an interest in learning how to listen deeply. I think how I approach difficult situations and arguments is always going to be mitigated by the nature of the disagreement, how power maps onto the situation, and what action is in the service of being responsive and just. That being said, I’m not someone who shies away from complexity, and I think that’s what attracts me to relational work—particularly relational work in the context of community. I’m very interested in learning what motivates people, what kind of communication and understanding they desire, how they imagine themselves in the world, what they feel to be right and wrong, how all of this is shaped by their experiences, how they’re in conversation with themselves and their environment—and conflict is an incredibly valuable source of information.”

Community Day in October

In your role as Community Manager, how is the practice of community at Antioch unfolding for you so far?

“Thus far, it’s unfolding in contradiction, struggle, confusion, and grace. I was really struck by something Mila Cooper (vice president for student affairs & senior diversity officer) said last week, about how when something has gone wrong, we conflate it to everything being wrong. We lose sight of the work that’s been done, and being done. It made me think about how we treat Antioch very binaristically, as either/or, instead of as a space of contradictions and complexity. Even folks who have struggled or been harmed by the institution, have stayed or returned for the relationships. The fact that people feel so drawn into relationships here, is to me, a signal of some kind of community practice, or commitment. Commitment is foundational to community practice.

“How do we be patient and also attend to suffering? How do we be forgiving and also accountable? How do we hold space for the multiplicity of truth and also be in the service of justice? How do we situate ourselves in so many worlds at once? How do we live in this paradigm while knowing that it is so much less than enough? Perhaps we can’t be situated at all. In the striving we find one other.”