• The NAACP of Lane County’s “Community
Conversations: Building Unity in our Community” series
of public meetings on race, privilege and equity
continues from 5:30 to 8 pm Thursday, April 14, at the
EWEB Community Room, North Building, 500 E. 4th Ave.
The meeting begins with a light dinner at 5:30. Additional
meetings in the series will be at the same time and
place on the second Thursday of each month through
May. Reservations are requested through
naacplanecounty.org or the Facebook page. Call 682-
5619.
• 10 am to 1 pm Friday, April 15, at the Eugene
downtown Post Office, 520 Willamette, community
members will be calling on the Federal government to
redirect taxes spent on war to instead fight climate
change and to fund education, job creation, health care
and other vital services. Taxpayers will have the
opportunity to decide where their tax dollars go by
participating in a penny poll. The event features a noon
rally with speakers and the music of the Raging
Grannies and Labor singer Mark Ross. All are welcome.
From 11 am to 10 pm the same day, Whirled Pies
Pizzeria, 1123 Monroe, will donate a percent of sales
to CALC. For more information about the day’s events,
contact CALC at (541) 485-1755.
• MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies) is holding a fundraiser in order to
purchase one kilogram of pharmaceutical grade MDMA
to continue Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted
psychotherapy for PTSD. A Eugene Psychedelic Dinner
will be held April 17 as part of dinners happening all
around the country this April to raise awareness and
funds to progress the therapeutic potential of
psychedelic drugs and continue to remove the stigma
associated with these substances. For more info go to
razoo.com/us/story/Global-Psychedelic-Dinner-
Eugene. To go to the Eugene potluck dinner, contact
Mike Francis at mikefrancisnow@gmail.com.
• Princeton historian Hendrik Hartog speaks on
justice and the complexities of gradual emancipation
in early 19th-century America 7:30 pm April 21 in 175
Knight Law Center at the UO. Hartog’s O’Fallon lecture
comes out of his current research on the long legal
history of slavery in New Jersey. He is the author of
Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the
City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983);
Man and Wife in America: a History (2000); and
Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance
and Old Age (2012). The lecture is free and open to the
public and will be live streamed. For more information, or
for disability accommodations (which must be made by
April 14), visit ohc.uoregon.edu or call (541) 346-3934.
• Springfield City Club will feature Ted Taylor who
recently retired after almost 18 years leading the area’s
alternative newspaper, Eugene Weekly. An avid fly
fisherman, he will reflect on his years of leadership at
the end of a long journalistic career and on how the
community and media have changed. Noon Thursday,
April 21, Willamalane Sports Center, Springfield. Free to
members, $10 nonmembers; with lunch $11 members,
$22 nonmembers.
LANE COUNTY AREA
SPRAY SCHEDULE
Oregon Department of Transportation is spraying
roadsides. Call 503-986-3010 to talk with a Vegetation
Management Coordinator or call 1-888-996-8080 for
recent herbicide application information. Highways I-5,
99, 101 and 126 East were recently sprayed.
Seneca Jones Timber Company, 689-1011, is
planning to hire JR Helicopters, 509-452-3300, to
aerially spray 109 acres near Hawley Creek East of
Lorane with 2,4-D, clopyralid, glyphosate, hexazinone,
sulfometuron methyl, atrazine and/or Crosshair. See
ODF notification 2016-781-04302, call Dan Menk or
Brian Peterson at 935-2283 with questions.
Giustina Land and Timber Company, 345-2301,
plans to hire Northwest Reforestation Services, 554-
0489, to spray a total of 145.5 acres on two units East of
Lorane with triclopyr, glyphosate and/or Forest Crop Oil.
See ODF notification 2016-781-04342, call Brian
Peterson at 541-935-2283 with questions.
Compiled by Jan Wroncy and Gary Hale, Forestland Dwellers: 342-
8332, www.forestlanddwellers.org
8
A pril 14, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
COMMUNITY MOURNS
LOSS OF ACTIVIST
LEIF BRECKE
O
n Sunday, April 10, dozens of people came to
Kesey Square in downtown Eugene to memo-
rialize a vibrant former member of the Eugene
community with Cascadian flags, pine cones and
other symbols of his years in activism, civic en-
gagement, advocating for diversity and more.
Leif Brecke, a graduate of the University of Oregon,
had moved to Southern Oregon in 2015, but his presence
is still felt strongly in Lane County. His April 6 passing
was announced on Facebook by his partner, Kay Wilde,
who wrote: “My partner, Leif Brecke, passed away ear-
lier today. He was so incredibly well loved and is so very
deeply missed.” She continues, “If you know someone
suffering from depression, please reach out to them and
let them know you’re there for them if they need it.”
Wilde says of Brecke, who was co-parenting his
daughter, “I loved exploring ideas with him. Talking
about the changes we wanted to see in our communities
and how to effect those chang-
es in an equitable way. I’d
brainstorm with him on how
to push changes through on
city commissions I sit on, or
how to best approach a sticky
civic issue like getting bike
lanes put through downtown
Medford.”
Brecke had worked for
the Resilient Communities
Project and at the Cascadian
Resilience Network and as a Grange Hall organizer. He
had worked in forest defense, was involved with Occupy
Eugene and worked with people with disabilities.
Wilde says, “Most of his background and activism
centered around community resilience. How can our
communities be as strong and resilient as possible? How
are we operating within our communities to make it ac-
cessible and equitable for all its members?” He also pro-
tested at the Nevada Test Sites, she says, and was tear-
gassed at the WTO protests in Seattle of 1999.
As secretary of the fraternal organization Bellview
Grange in Ashland last year, he endorsed causes such as
fighting the liquefied natural gas pipeline, and food and
water security, Wilde says.
She says of Brecke, “No matter how much he dis-
agreed with someone, he’d still try to maintain that notion
of humanity and connection,” adding, “he was a community
builder first and foremost.”
“I feel like he brought so many different communities to-
gether,” says Brecke’s friend Silver Mogart, who attended the
April 10 memorial. “It was amazing to see the different back-
grounds of people at the event yesterday.”
“He was into everything; he knew so much about so many
different topics,” Mogart continues. Mogart, who is presi-
dent of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens),
worked with Brecke on a committee at CALC (Community
Alliance of Lane County) fighting racism and LGBTQ bias
and hate.
“Leif was warm and kind and not just thoughtful,” he says.
“He came from a place of love and warmth and trying to bring
a change.” Mogart adds, “He had the most amazing laugh, a
cross between a chortle, I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Connor Salisbury went to high school with Brecke in
Coos Bay and says that even then, Brecke “was always both a
champion of defending those who
were targeted for abuse of discrim-
ination and the first person in the
room to understand when a system
or set of rules were rigged to cause
harm.”
Dana Jo Cook says Brecke was
“a support advocate. He supported
me when I first decided to break
— K AY W I L D E
out of the stay-at-home-mom role
over five years ago.” Cook says,
“He said my skills would be im-
portant to the activist community and he was right.”
Cook cautions that as an activist, “taking time for self care
gets thrown out the window because the urgency of the work
is so important. That’s the lesson we as an activist community
need to remember: Reach out to each other, take a break. We
all need each other if we are going to do anything about the
issues that affect all of us.”
Wilde says, “He was definitely a radical — but his radical-
ism was also rooted in love, connection, understanding and
growth. He was my best friend, and I know he held that role
for many other people as well.”
A GoFundMe account has been created to help give Wilde
time to process her partner’s death and can be found at go-
fundme.com/9yyrsr6c. On the page Wilde supplies the num-
ber for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-
8255.
Leif Brecke ‘was a
community builder
first and foremost.’