Back in August we moved into our new offices in Oakland, and we’ve been slowly putting it together in the months since. We’re not done! We’ve got more artwork to frame and mount, more furniture to order, but the office is finally at a place where I’m happy showing it off.
Fair warning, this is no pro-photography at work, just my phone camera. And the lighting was brutal —the office is surrounded by windows and I had a great deal of morning light streaming in, so that made everything look darker than had I taken these photos in the evening. I tried to lighten them up, but really, my work was crude at best But regardless, it should give you a good idea of what Kos HQ looks like. Enjoy!
From the outside hallway, looking into our front door. That’s the conference room in the back:
Our conference room:
The other end of the conference room. It’s a HUGE room, so we’ve got some informal soft seating on that side. We even considered carving an office out of it, but the landlord wasn’t keen on the idea. On the walls we have a Love Wins LGBT poster and a framed print of the Ebony magazine cover of the Selma march. Not pictured, on the other side, I have a couple of Cesar Chavez prints.
This is from the entrance, looking to the right into the office. On the left is the door to the conference room. The Daily Kos quilt is just out of sight, on the left side.
First thing you see when entering the office, after the conference room, is a framed plaque of the first post I ever wrote on the site. This was Susan’s idea. It actually pains me to read it. Had I known it would someday be a thing, I would’ve put more thought into it. That said, I now superstitiously touch it every time I walk into the office. Kinda weird, but it calms me somehow, maybe gives me a tactile connection to the past, and reminds me how far this has all come in just a little over a decade.
And here’s our beloved quilt, the next thing you see when entering the office:
On the right we have a wall full of prints by artist Robert Shetterly. We have 10 of his prints already up in the office, with another three on backorder (Molly Ivins, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Carlos Muñoz, Jr.). The first two upon walking in are Chief Joseph Hinmton Yalektit and Harriet Tubman. My favorite factoid (that I didn’t know) about Tubman was that she was the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War.
If we had the space, we could’ve had dozens of these portraits in the office. So how did we narrow things down? While we didn’t always succeed, part of the goal was to feature people who were lesser known, so rather than have MLK, Cesar Chavez, and Malcom X, we tried to have people like Bob Moses, who one historian said, "I think his influence is almost on par with Martin Luther King, and yet he's almost totally unknown." Also below, Dorothy Day.
More portraits, Ida Tarbell and—proving we didn’t always end up with lesser-known giants of the liberal movement—Frederick Douglas.
And yet more portraits, Ella Baker and John Muir. Baker, in particular, was an early proponent of people-power: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Rounding out the entrance hallway, we have Jane Addams, who among other things, was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Moving deeper into the office, we have our kitchen, here facing out into the hallway.
And there you see two more Shetterly prints, Bill McKibben and Claudette Colvin, someone I had never heard of before I perused Shetterly’s list of heroes. I absolutely adore Colvin’s story. She was 15 years old when she refused to give up her front-row seat to a white person on a Birmingham, Alabama, bus a full nine months before Rosa Parks did so. “I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying. ‘Sit down girl!’ I was glued to my seat,” she said. She was arrested, leading to huge outrage in the black community. Martin Luther King came down to protest her arrest. Civil Rights leaders considered making her the face of resistance, but she was considered too young and, disturbingly, too dark, before she ended up pregnant ending the debate once and for all. Still, she was one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that ended bus segregation.
This is our “Quiet Room,” or what I call it, the “Oakland Room.” Since we have many people working in an open area, this offers a place to make phone calls or work without distractions when necessary.
The Oakland Room from the other side.
Here is the open work space, from my “office”, which is an orange chair in the corner. The kitchen is behind the orange wall.
Here’s a closeup of that orange wall, which we’re using to put up campaign posters and other campaign miscellany:
Here’s the other side of that room, with my chair:
Another picture of that side of the room:
And yet another one:
My workspace. I’m not a desk person, obviously, though I’ll use a standing desk several times a day. I used to use a third monitor, but I’ve downsized to two screens:
Another Shetterly print, this one of the Rev. William Barber. (Hey, there I am taking the picture!)
And here’s some overflow desks from when we have people from out of town. Those are also standing desks, so that’s where those of us go when we want to work standing up for a while. It’s super healthy to do so!
In that frame we have pictures of a gay couple protesting outside of Kim Davis’s office, and the picture below is the first same-sex “first kiss” in the navy. We have framed iconic news photographs around the office, including photos from immigration rallies, an immigration naturalization service, a Keystone XL protest at a Lakota reservation, a pro-Planned Parenthood protest, and pictures from Ferguson, Missouri.
Hope you enjoyed this little walk-through!