Outgoing Olympia Council member talks about the possibility of transformative change
Renata Rollins was always an unlikely choice for a politician.
Less than a year before her election to Olympia City Council in 2017, Rollins, a former downtown ambassador, had left her job doing street outreach for Capital Recovery Center, and was ready to leave Olympia entirely.
She had never been much of a believer in the electoral process, focusing her political commitments instead on direct action social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Just Housing, an activist group she co-founded to advocate for the rights and needs of people experiencing homelessness.
So when she ran for city council and was elected in November 2017, it posed an interesting question: What happens when someone with an uncompromising vision for social justice actually gets into power? Is it even possible for one person to change an entire system?
Like Kshama Sawant, the socialist member of the Seattle City Council, or Larry Krasner — the civil rights lawyer whose election turned the District Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia into one of the of most radically progressive experiments in reversing mass incarceration — Rollins’ tenure in Olympia offers a test case for the limits of transformative change on the municipal level.
If you’d asked Rollins these questions a year ago, you may have gotten a different answer.
When Rollins announced last February that she would not run for reelection, she sounded sobered by the realities of how hard it can be to transform city policies, exhausted by inertia and bureaucratic resistance. These days, she talks more sanguinely about her exit, not as giving up on the revolutionary dream, but as a measure of success: System change is happening so fast that her voice is no longer needed.
“On certain issues around homelessness and harm reduction on council two years ago, I felt like if I didn’t say anything, it wasn’t going to be heard,” she said last July. “And now, especially on policing, I don’t feel that’s the case. I think that’s more and more being seen as common sense, kind of mainstream.”
When Rollins met with The Olympian for a conversation the day after her last meeting as a member of Olympia City Council, she was embracing the freedom that comes with leaving office. She was asked if she has any official duties left.
“I guess just yell at other cities on Facebook,” she joked, a reference to her increasingly outspoken criticism of the city of Lacey, which she says is opposing efforts to pass a countywide Home Fund.
Rollins’ willingness to take strong stands has sometimes gotten her in trouble. Early in the pandemic she announced she was participating in a rent strike, which earned her a response letter from her landlord, criticism from The Olympian’s editorial board, and later a recall effort, which ultimately did not materialize. The story was picked up by television stations and became grist for right-wing media.
She is reluctant to list specific accomplishments she wants to take credit for, one of the many ways in which being a politician has been an uncomfortable experience for her. One thing she will confidently tell you is that she believes she has changed the conversation in Olympia. In her time on council, she’s made the institution more like her, and in turn been shaped by it.
“I don’t know if the city is quite there seeing themselves as, ‘actually what we’re trying to do, what we need to do, is exactly what activists and community organizers do,’ which is to force the issue, change the community conversation,” Rollins said.
“I look for the moments where there’s a shift in acceptance of reality as it is. And it’s certainly not visible and experienced by most people out in the community, but I’ve seen that happen in city hall.”
The day after New Year’s, Rollins packed up her things and moved across the state to a small town outside Spokane, where she’s enrolled in a water science program at a local community college. She’s not yet decided what direction her new career will take her, but looks forward to spending more time outdoors.
The following conversation with Rollins has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.
The Olympian: Have your feelings about electoral politics changed during your time on council?
Renata Rollins: (Laughs). “I can see how some people can make it work. Whether the timeline of the kind of systemic change that people are able to push for inside, whether that’s good enough, that’s up to everybody else. I can say I’ve gotten more … I much more value trying to hold the whole community together somehow, rather than ‘let’s start all over, f it,’ than I was earlier. I mean, I’ve seen more clearly what backlash looks like — I’m thinking of the people that are angry about our homelessness policies, that are angry about harm reduction and are targeting camps. I think there is some role, even if it’s just kind of ceremonial almost, of having some kind of formal community leadership.”
TO: You’re saying there’s a role for someone, if not to be the compromise person, necessarily, but to bridge divides?
RR: “I don’t want society or community to fall apart more than it is, because I think we know who would be the most hurt by that. So yeah, I think there’s a role in trying to keep people together, and in our system some of that is elected office. It’s not necessarily … it’s not for everybody.”
In terms of trying to hold together these various constituencies, on some level you come from the world of direct action and movement politics. Do you feel the anarchist/antifascist wing of the activist movement has felt represented by you?
“There’s definitely been times where I’ve heard and gotten feedback, or just seen on social media — being the lone vote against reinstituting tear gas, speaking out against sweeps in prior times. But I think over, particularly post-2020, and then by the end of last year, I think for the most part it just wasn’t enough.”
Do you feel frustrated by that kind of purity politics mentality?
“Of course I do, because I’m a harm reductionist. You can’t be a perfectionist about harm reduction. It’s a huge contradiction on the left. And I don’t want to come across as more critical of the left that I am, like, actual Neo-Nazis, but that’s the segment of the community I come from, and as a reflective person I think our movements should be — we want accountability from everybody else, so why can’t we have open conversations? So I think that’s a huge contradiction that is worth movements exploring.”
The way you’ve described how the city has changed during your term, it’s this very subtle process that is probably imperceptible to most people. And I could see one saying, ‘transformative change is about specific actions, not about overall vibes, if you will, at city hall. But you’re saying that that shift in understanding is as important as anything concrete that the council has done or not done?
“To me it’s the foundation of making sure that it’s a lasting cultural change, and that it reflects, because I do think there’s a lasting cultural change in the world, up and coming generations and such. It’s the kind of work that’s necessary so that if we do take action, that there’s a real logic and understanding to it — not just, ‘Okay, well, people want this, so I guess it will make some people mad but some people happy’ — that it’s really lasting.”
Do you feel like the city was more reactive when you started? It sounds like that’s kind of what you’re saying about the previous encampment policy, is that there wasn’t a policy and it was just like,’ if someone complains enough, we’ll get rid of the camp,’ rather than actually having a vision on homelessness.
“I think like most places, there’s just a, on the issue of sweeps particularly, there’s kind of this mistaken belief that if you make it inhospitable to people living outside, then that will be a factor in the column of someone making a decision to change in their life. And so people see this as, when we aren’t sweeping, they call it enabling, because they’re still in that mindset.”
I’m aware though that there were two recent sweeps. Is it disappointing to go out on that kind of note?
“Deschutes, I really believe that was the best we could have done. And it’s hard to say that. What we’re doing is participating in building more capacity, changing structures, investing in OlyMAP. If we could scale up solutions like that, and with the other jurisdictions, sweeps would not be necessary. It’s sad. Sweeps are inherently violent. But I also, it’s the perfectionism versus progress. Like for me, it’s a sad reality of what the capacity of the system is right now. … If we’re not able to change the context that we are operating in — namely county, state, federal — we can’t do the things the way that we would like to all the time without the landscape changing in a bigger way. I think we’ve gone about as far as we can without changing the landscape more.”
Do you feel like you’ve been able to do that in your four years, to change the conversation?
“At the city, yeah. I don’t think I’ve had much influence, at least positively, at the countywide [level]. There’s a huge gap in knowledge that I don’t think I’ve really had a strong role in bridging beyond the city.”
I hear you not wanting to have a technocratic vision of, ‘I did all these things.’
“I don’t. I was asked the same thing on Olympia Standard and I’m like, uh, I just don’t. I’m not a Jessica Bateman. I love Jessica Bateman, but I don’t think of it that way. It’s more like seeds and space holding for the possible.”
Are you less somber about your legacy now than you were last February?
“You can just be kind of like, I guess like the Bernie Sanders and just kind of keep saying the loud [thing] — and I think that’s what people, they just want me to keep being loud and saying the things. But I can see how that, I think that helps, I think that’s been helpful at times, but you also just, people that listen at first, they sort of just stop listening. Because it’s just like, oh that’s just Renata again. I just felt like that wasn’t a good, when I calculate how to use my energy, that wasn’t a good role to keep playing, and I think there’s so much more to governance than that. Especially when things, I think the ship is going in the right direction.”
So you’re not saying you failed, but that you are recognizing you’re better at using different tactics to pursue the same goals?
“I think when I look back, there are moments where it’s important to have just kind of an interruption. And I think that that’s what my candidacy and my time in office — even though, I was very polite and easygoing compared to how a lot of people might have been — but I was undoubtedly an interruption to the institution in my own way, and I think that that was necessary.
“But I think that because I’ve been there, because the social movement became so much more vocal in the last year and active — those are a couple factors that I think led to overtaking the inertia or breaking a logjam on a lot of issues that have just been building up frankly over the decades. And now that the ship is on a better course — and this kind of gets back to ‘where is the fight’ — but I don’t think the fight is so much having a loud vocal critic necessarily on the council.”
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