The living room has a warm feeling to it. There’s a fireplace along one wall and bookshelves along the other. The furniture was probably picked up off the side of the road during move-out week on campus, but it’s still in good condition. The glass coffee table is Windexed and nearly always smudge-free. If it weren’t for the inflammatory political posters that line the walls or the bookshelves filled with radical anarchist publications, this could be anybody’s house.

Maybe it’s not what you’d expect from a group of Lawrence radicals who opened up their home to the collective public in September 2001. Maybe you’d expect something more reminiscent of the crust punk era of the ’60s and ’70s. Maybe you’d expect a little more chaos out of a space that identifies itself with political anarchism.

“I think when we first started people expected to see a lot of dirty patched up crusted punk kids,” says Dave Strano, a 27-year-old Lawrence, who became involved with the Mother Earth Collective, located at 1305 Tennessee St. shortly after it began. “We’ve done a lot of work to dispel that image. We try to make our space as clean and comfortable as possible. A lot of people aren’t used to the subject matter we’re talking about and it can be kind of intimidating. We want people to feel comfortable.”

On any given day, residents of the Mother Earth Collective might have walked into the kitchen of to find a stranger perusing the cabinets for food or maybe some familiar faces using the free Internet provided down the hall. But more often than not, they might have found a living room full of people enjoying a meal together and discussing politics.

“This was all right after Sept. 11 happened,” Strano says. “There would always be huge group discussions. People would sit on bean bags or on the floor just talking. It was a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds looking for a place to come together and examine what was going on and try to decide what the heck to do with this new type of world that we’d all found ourselves in. People were really energized and politicized.”

Eventually the project outgrew its roots and moved downtown as the Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library which now offers a free lending library of about 6,000 alternative and radical political books, free computers and internet access, meeting spaces and events for the public including speakers, film showings, art exhibits and musicians. Everything is free to the public and is coordinated and run by volunteers.

“I don’t’ think there’s anything Solidarity offers that the community couldn’t offer,” says volunteer Erika Shearer. “But it doesn’t. Most communities this size don’t have something like this.”

The main work at Solidarity focuses on helping out residents within the community who are struggling and to invite political spectators to become more involved with politics within their own community. The Solidarity Center undergoes major fundraising campaigns every year to cover the costs of operation, but funds are also used for simple things like buying food to give to people who can’t necessarily buy their own. “We want to be able to help our community survive this impending economic collapse,” Strano says. We want to feed more people, house people and be able to take care of people in our neighborhoods. We already have a lot of people involved in our space that come out of middle class backgrounds who are dealing with hunger, or their landlord being foreclosed upon. We just want to try to help each other out and help out the rest of our community.”

But volunteers and activists associated with the Solidarity Center know that there’s a darker, more difficult side to what they do. “We have friends facing major terrorism charges,” Strano says, adding that a chunk of their fundraising goes to help out fellow activists facing legal trouble. He says that he has also had trouble getting jobs before because of his political and, consequently, legal history. “In a lot of places people might try to water down their politics for fear of being pigeon holed and stereotyped, but we try to be up front about who we are,” he says.

Shearer says that she sometimes has trouble reconciling her political beliefs with her daily life. “It’s a constant conflict,” she says. “I’m trying to be realistic to how is the world actually functioning now but sometimes I wonder if I’m being holier than thou or you know, do I have a right to be angry when someone does something that seems small? The horrible example is driving your car when you could walk. Can I get mad at people? It’s a fine line. It’s frustrating and complicated and constantly a struggle inside because the world doesn’t always function as I think it should.”