Where have I been for the last six years and what’s coming up next? The last time I published a blog post was a little over six years ago now. It was called “Update to 2015 Plans.” Since then much has occurred. Here are some highlights. They include:
- Family Compound Explorations
- Trump and Political Activism
- Lobbying Against California’s Anti-Homeschooling Bills
- Home Occupation Code Lobbying Plans
- NLRBE-Compatible Singer-Songwriter Performances
As you may recall from my 2015 blog post, I became intrigued with family compounds as an alternative to communal living with strangers. Along those lines, in early 2016, my family essentially experimented with having a bit of an extended-family, NLRBE-like, family compound. Our niece and her boyfriend moved in, rent-free. That was a wonderful, fascinating experiment. Eventually they broke up and moved out. But we loved having them and learned much from that experience.
Fast forward to 2020 and now 2021, the experimentation continues, as COVID-19 continues to keep all of my family members at home, much of the time. It’s just our nuclear family now, i.e., me, my husband, and our two sons, ages 16 and 20. And, to be fair, we’ve always been more home-focused than your average US family. Both boys have always been homeschooled/unschooled. And both my husband and I have worked from home for over a decade now. Also, even with our kids 17 and 21, we continue to coordinate and share all meal prep and meals, evening routines, sleep, etc.. However, before COVID-19, my husband’s consultancy work had him out with clients most of each weekday. And my sons and I were out participating in homeschooling activities multiple times a week. In addition, even when at home, we were often quite spread out in our large house.
But since COVID-19, we’ve been spending a lot more time together, and we’re absolutely loving it! For example, I used to work in my own home office, periodically checking in with my sons in a small office they shared. But for most of 2020 we spent our mornings “co-working” outdoors on our big covered back porch, and over the winter of 2020-21 we’ve been working side-by-side indoors at our dining room table. It’s been just lovely. And it’s really increased our desire to live together as our kids continue to grow up. So we’re all hoping that one day our sons will have partners and kids of their own who want to participate in extended family living.
Given all this, I am now more interested than ever in promoting policies that dovetail with extended family, multi-generational living. There is so much this lifestyle has to offer. First, the law offers families many ways to engage in relatively unfettered NLRBE-like, egalitarian, gift-based relationships, which are not as readily available to legal entities or groups of unrelated individuals. Second, family compound living can help family members save significantly on housing and other expenses, by engaging in internal shared-use and gifted-services strategies. Third, such expense cutting, shared-use and gifted-services strategies can allow family members to spend less time focused on money-making. This can allow them to spend more time on realizing their dreams, becoming active citizens and doing gift-economy-based work, including nurturing the children of the family. Fourth, and along those same lines, it can become much easier to engage in attachment parenting and homeschooling specifically – both extremely nourishing strategies for the whole family, as I explain on my website www.family-life-possibilities.com. Given this, I continue to look for ways to make it easy for families to live together, work from home, engage in attachment-parenting and homeschool/unschool their children.
Around mid-2016, the US presidential election campaign began to concern my husband and I. We began following the news far more closely than we had before. And it wasn’t long before we began to have a bad feeling that Donald Trump might just win.
So we began volunteering, knowing how hard it would be to live with ourselves if we hadn’t done all we could to stop that from happening. I made hundreds of calls and my whole family traveled to Nevada twice to go door-to-door for Hillary.
When Trump won and became our 45th US President, we were devastated. We could barely sleep. We could barely eat. I felt nauseous all the time. And ultimately, my political action focus changed significantly as a result.
During my years focused primarily on advocating for an NLRBE, I had taken for granted a certain political floor, if you will. I had never bought into the idea that it didn’t matter which party was in power. All I had to do was look at the environment, health-care, reproductive rights, and so many other issues to know that it did.
But, nonetheless, I really hadn’t been putting much energy into maintaining any part of our system as it was, because I didn’t really believe it could get much worse. Rather, I looked at it as a solid foundation, upon which I could firmly stand, while aspiring to even more and better for our country and our world.
But our 2016 presidential election showed me that I had been sorely mistaken. Things could get worse – much worse. And the status quo, while far from being an NLRBE, was also far from how unlike an NLRBE things could be.
So that election was a big wake-up call for me, a call to consistently put a significant percentage of my time into simply maintaining the NLRBE-like elements we already have, while working to incrementally move that status quo towards an increasingly NLRBE-like version, rather than working almost exclusively for an exponentially different future world, while virtually ignoring day-to-day politics.
And that I did, from 2017 to the present. I fought off everything from the repeal of Obamacare to four more years of the Trump administration and a Republican Senate. In addition to participating in protest marches periodically, I engaged nearly daily in texting for Move-On and making texting and making calls for many campaigns and the Democratic party. It has all become a regular part of life now, and I’m sure will continue to be.
However, this work hasn’t really required my legal skills. And the legal work I did do was pretty much confined to work for our family and my husband’s consulting business. That is until, early 2018, when two anti-homeschooling bills were introduced into the California State Assembly.
Lobbying Against California’s Anti-Homeschooling Bills
You can read all about this at my blog post “How I Helped Protect Homeschooling in California.” Here I’ll just say, what would ensue, not long after the introduction of two anti-homeschooling bills into the California State Assembly in 2018, was utterly transformative for me. It revived my interest in the practice of law, reminded me of its incredible power, reminded me of my skills at wielding its power, and clarified for me that I could use this power to contribute even more to the causes I cared about than I had been. For all the exciting details, check out this blog post.
I am currently researching how I can collaborate with others to try to get changes made to some of the home occupation code sections for the city where I live, Sacramento, California. And I’m open to pushing for statewide legislation along similar lines as well. I would like to big changes. But, at the very least, I’d like to see home occupation codes loosen their limits on home business square footage, number of home businesses and number of resident-participants. Such limitations are particularly injurious to low-income and minority families, which are more likely to have large numbers of economically disadvantaged people living in relatively small dwellings. And there are less injurious ways of protecting neighborhoods from feared business-related nuisances. This fact gives me extra motivation to pursue the work ahead. I’m at just the beginning of this project. So stay tuned for details and updates.
NLRBE-Compatible Singer-Songwriter Performances
Lastly, beginning in early 2016, I started to delve more deeply into my long-time singer-songwriter hobby. Many of my songs have NLRBE-compatible themes and mode of delivery, i.e., free/gift-economy-based. I had been feeling so discouraged about people really getting the benefits of and need for a more egalitarian economy, like an NLRBE, that I wondered if maybe a left-brained/musical approach might not fare better at enlightening others. In addition, after years of voice lessons and recitals, I found myself craving more. So I began performing at open mics.
Then I heard about performing online, through an online venue/app called YouNow. Like street busking, livestreaming on YouNow involved freely giving one’s music, with tips optional. That is broadcasters made money via online gifts, given optionally and freely by listeners, versus via required ticket purchases or advertising. I was all in. I shopped for equipment, and started performing online almost every weekday, except for periods of technical trouble, beginning around the start of 2017. Soon after I switched to simulcasting my broadcasts to YouNow and Periscope, then I switched to just broadcasting on Periscope.
In early 2020 I began to simulcast my broadcasts to Periscope, Twitch, YouTube and Facebook, with the username, TiffanyTLCMusic. Although Periscope will be closing shop on March 31, 2021, I plan to continue simulcasting my music to the other three platforms.
I have absolutely adored having this area of my life be completely gift-economy based and have deeply appreciated the friendships I have forged, with folks who love my music. These performances and connections really keep me going. If you’re like-minded, you might enjoy them as well. Feel free to click on the links above to follow and get notified when I broadcast (most weekdays, usually between about 5-6 PM PT).
By Tiffany Clark, an activist attorney, public interest lobbyist, consultant, public speaker, researcher and author, working to protect families and help the whole world live more like family. Tiffany lives and works in Sacramento, CA, with her husband, two sons and their pets. You can find out more about Tiffany, her activities, and her offerings, as well as read more of her writing at www.tiffanyclarklaw.com.
This blog post by Tiffany Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, however some pictures within blog posts may not be so licensed because copyrights are held by others and authorized only for my use, so please do not use without first inquiring.
