Conversations with Kristen Cox

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristen Cox

Hi Kristen, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I always knew I wanted to work in the social change sector, to find a career that felt honest and truly ‘socially just.’ The options I knew about were to work in the cooperative business sector, or in my case, entering the social work field. I choose to pursue community-level social work and focused on community development for my Masters Degree which I received from the University of Chicago in 2003.

I found my way, after working in contemporary dance, and the arts and cultural sector in Chicago, to economic justice. There are many types of health for us, and for our families – social, personal, physical and financial.

It was the community development credit union movement in which I decided to deepen and develop a career. It was one where I could connect with others around my own personal, lived experience having had to rebuild my credit in my 20’s and as a victim of identify theft. I became a Community Relations Manager for an independent credit union that also served as a HUD-certified housing counseling agency in Chicago thinking credit unions, as cooperative, solidarity economy institutions, would navigate us around a corporatized capitalist financial system.

The most profound lesson i didn’t expect to learn while working in the socially responsible, community investing sector for 8 years was that land is an asset class – an important investment, rare, depleting, meant to be protected, yet also at the heart and soul of racial disruption, power and wealth inequality in this country.

After I quit my job at Self-Help in 2016 – the job for which I moved back to the South in 2010- I took a three week solo venture to Morocco in Spring 2017. and manifested a different vision of labor, work, community offering, and how I could ‘give back’ to the community as someone who has benefited from inherited land-based wealth.

I brought ‘Emergent Strategies’ which is one of Adrienne Maree Brown’s seminal texts – or manifesto, as I call it – for how movement organizers could rethink how we maneuver together, in step with nature or models that the natural world show us if we were only somber enough to listen and take in.

I bought the 23 acres of land and watershed I currently steward in 2018. 2/3 came from a bank mortgage i got approved working as the Communications and Development Manager for Durham Community Land Trustees (DCLT), Durham’s only permanent affordable housing developer and community land trust. 1/3 came from cash I liquidated from stocks I inherited.

I built a 600 square foot cabin in which I live and converted the 3 BDR/3 BTH Roundhouse into an intimate retreat space and have been offering it to individuals and small groups looking for rest retreats, family gatherings or cultural residencies according to solidarity scale for four years. This will be the Respite’s 5th and last season.

This journey has landed me firmly as a critic of banks who are wrapped into our corporate empire’s ultimate scheme to convince us that property ownership is the quintessential American dream It’s a myth that underpins or fuels banks’ continual control over most all of our lives. It is the most steadfast source of capital that the banks use – a long-term loan of 15 to 30 years.

Thus, when I arrived on this land having been political educated from a variety of groups throughout my life – most notably Resource Generation, Highlander Center, United for a Fair Economy – i researched the roots and its indigeneity. This was Occaneechi Saponi land with its magestic creek running through stones, rocks and rolling green hills. The rest is a story to be told by my soil sisters, members of the Jeffries family and their tribe, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, who will be converting this land into a family trust,

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No, owning and managing and tending out buildings and a roundhouse built in the 80’s has not been necessarily smooth. Because it was a clear intention to rematriate the land and assets to MK and her family after meeting them in Spring of 2019, I never set up a non-profit through which to raise grants, nor did I pursue developing a niche Airbnb or Bed & Breakfast business.

This was always going to be a community venture and with that comes the inherent difficulty to make ends meet.

To be a successful business, one needs to market constantly and maintain high ratings.

To be a successful non-profit, I’d need to have a board of directors and a clear mission and vision.

Choosing to side-step capitalism and welcome guests to a space that asks for reciprocation of care and courtesy in paying what you can afford and honoring the intention behind the venture is not for everyone. There are those who expect hotel-grade immaculacy and those who treat the house with disrespect or break things out of century-old ancestral racial disgust. There are those who want more amenities and those who do not pay as they say they will.

Because the Respite operates as a short-term rental hospitality model welcoming 30-40 guests per year, I have come into contact with people of all backgrounds with kind, compassionate and gracious demeanors and those who are vengeful, defensive and where I have been, as the host and land owner, the object of misguided anger.

We are all human, for sure. As a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), it has been a struggle to keep spiritually sound boundaries in place given all the masks people put on and carry with them, especially to a place they are seeking solace and respite.

Carrying on with my own personal left-of-center lifestyle while also running a business in the place that I live proved to be a challenge in several instances.

I attempted to steer the Respite in the first few years with an advisory crew made up of creatives and knowledgeable allies from various, interactive walks of my life. Building trust with folks from a myriad of ancestral backgrounds proved difficult, given that we were not a formal non-profit with clear guidelines and by-laws, for example.

The Respite is now steered by three members of a collective who have known each other for several years. Anna is an heir of the land and a daughter of MK; Steven is Indigenous, himself, but not Afro-Indigenous and a cultural creative. The Respite pays Anna and Steven as collaborators to help steer the business.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a creative connector and cultural curator, a shape shifter and spacial justice orchestrator. How I created a trail and developed the campsites, forming a campground to help generate revenue out here is one of my talents. I converted and designed the Roundhouse, from what hangs on the walls to the custom-built trestle table I had made around which people eat and commune.

When COVID hit, I wanted folks to know they could come here to enjoy the outdoors and find peace along the land and creek. Folks needed a place to go to the bathroom, so I asked two of my queer woodworker friends to co-lead a Bathhouse building workshop that would span a few weekends. Folks would learn how to build an outdoor shower, compost toilet shelter and a platform for an outdoor sink and pay what they could afford. I made it a sliding scale offering for and led by queer women. We announced it on Instagram with photos I had shot with the instructors on the land during a prepatory meeting. The ‘camp’ was full within 3 hours with a waitlist of interested participants.

The bathhouse was the first big lift I made happen out here and I’m so proud of it because it is made from trees that fell in the front forest, then dragged into location by a tree service company, and then sawed by a portable saw mill and stacked and aged in the barn on the land.

I recruited friends and volunteers to cut and lay flooring in the ground level bedrooms which weren’t supposed to be bedrooms to begin with. I designed and hired a three-person team to build a farmhouse bathroom that was originally the electricity closet. It houses a clawfoot tub for guests to soak in.

I identify as a creative structuralist; i think about the systems or containers people need in order to exercise creative freedom. When I had no desire to form a nonprofit since this wasn’t ‘my land or long-term project,’ I sought out a fiscal sponsorship with Alternate ROOTS so I could raise small grants for artist residencies or other programming needs. This newsletter edition illustrates some recent program highlights! https://mailchi.mp/37cfd516e31f/spring-retreats-and-summer-availability I offered a few artist groups and colleagues for whom I met through Alternate ROOTS week-long residencies this past year through an Artist Development grant I received from ROOTS. This was also an example of how I acted as a creative structuralist providing the container and funding i.e. the residency site for four groups’ own cultural and healing retreats i.e. creative freedom.

I am a visual learner and spacial thinker. I was a dancer growing up and am in continual relationship with my mover-self and need to find movement practices so I can continue to navigate the world as a creative being. Like rivers, I am in constant discovery, always moving, never stagnant.

And I have always been a creative instigator and a visionary. I built a community following from relationships I built in Durham, NC to help sustain the booking of the Roundhouse. To date, we have 780 folks (with a steady 60 – 70% engagement rate) subscribed to the Respite’s newsletter which I have built form the past five years. On Instagram, we have garnered a following of over 2700 folks.

I have been a community programmer and creative in every job I have ever held, regardless if it was organizing the first Teen Arts Expo for the Chicago Park District or a Community Celebration & Fundraiser that featured poets and Pierce Freelon as emcee and Kooley High from Raleigh at Durham Central Park to benefit DCLT.

Now, in my capacity as Land Steward and Collective Member of the Respite, we are gearing up to announce ‘Land Practice Days’ which is a program I dreamt up that will take place every 3rd Sunday from February to October in 2025. Folks will be invited to come join in a guided, walking or somatic meditation in the forest by the creek for an hour, then join in a work offering for the day and then end with a fire circle and food in fellowship. Each day will be led by two or three facilitators we will pay from our community.

Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
That ‘sense of urgency’ is a real characteristic – https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/urgency.html – that many good meaning white folks, like myself, fall prey to embodying and acting out.

Taking time to build trust with those with whom you are going to make lifelong decisions will only re-affirm the shared set of values to guide the collective work that will be shaped and held together.

Pricing:

• WEEKDAYS : $40 – $125 per night, depending on # of BDRs desired.
• WEEKEND : $175 – $300 per night, depending on # of BDRs desired.
• $85 for Upstairs, 1 BDR/BATH clean; $150 for Full House, 3 BDR / 3 BATH

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.respiteintheround.org
• Instagram: @respiteintheroundnc
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W46OK_f8c9o