Dreaming Freedom, Finding Home

In the cosmology of my spiritual tradition, money was a curse unleashed on the world, alongside death and illness. Across centuries of empire, enslavement, and racial capitalism, money became a machine that consumed everything in its path. It stole our bodies, our time, our creativity, our imagination. It severed us from our homelands, scattering our people and fracturing our lineages. And yet, there are some things that could not be stolen.

Culture is a part of us that can never die. Even when genocide, ecocide, climate change, and forced migration tore us from our lands and homes, culture survived. It carried us together, our lineage, and our life force forward through song, ritual, language, and memory. For queer people, trans people, Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color (QTBIPOC), culture has always been more than survival—it has been resistance and disruption—a rejection of the white supremacist cis hetero capitalist patriarchy. QTBIPOC culture and imagination are how we claim all of ourselves in a white and narrow world that tells us we are too much. QTBIPOC culture reflects the fullness of our genders and spirits and lives and is a way to imagine ourselves whole again, find joy amidst erasure, and find home in each other, even when we are far from home.

But racial capitalism continues its theft—particularly when combined with the cisheteropatriarchy—not only of land and wealth but of our time to rest, our space to create, our chance to play, and our freedom to dream. Without this time and space, our imagination is stifled.  Without imagination, we cannot build the futures our communities deserve. The world and our movements desperately need the creativity and imagination of QTBIPOC. 

That is why we created Temple of Two Waters (T2W). T2W activates sites of freedom and sanctuary for QTBIPOC to rest, heal, create, and dream together. The vision for T2W was born in 2024 after I was gifted a parcel of land in rural Sinkiyuse territory in the Ancient Lakes region of so-called Washington State — where my family was displaced to and where I spent the majority of my childhood. I immediately saw the possibilities for the land to serve as a sanctuary for local, regional, and national QTBIPOC communities — a place forrest, retreat, creativity, gathering, and healing. It could also answer many of the calls rising from community: to heal our relationship with land and nature, to offer sanctuary and home, to serve as a gathering ground in moments of disaster, and to cultivate the creative rest where imagination takes root.

With support from individual donors and the Kataly Foundation, T2W has secured an additional 20 acres of land close to the original parcel. Our first secured sites are nestled between two creeks and border a wildlife preserve. In partnership with fellow New Orleans QTBIPOC organizers and creatives, we are also identifying a metro site that will connect New Orleans QTBIPOC communities to these same resources. Over the next 18 months, T2W is working to secure the resources to build out our sites and carry us through our first year of programming. Together, these locations trace a common migratory path from the Gulf South to the rural Northwest—a journey many of our people have taken over time, whether by choice, force, or survival—including my parents. 

T2W exists at the intersections of land justice, reparations, queer and trans liberation, and cultural and spiritual justice. When we lose the space to dream or play, we lose our capacity to imagine freedom. It is an antidote to the forces that seek to silence us, erase us, or push us into exile.

Born of Lineage and Love

This work was born from the lineage of those who understood that song is both a weapon and a spell. 

T2W carries the music of our fathers and the stories of our mothers. It lives in the memory of long nights spent talking it out at the kitchen table, in the laughter on the bayou, in the ecstatic joy of queer dance floors where we created daybreak together. It is born of Carnaval, of collective ritual, of our feral delight and our fierce love for one another.

It is also born from the Southern freedom movements that came before us– from ancestors who put their bodies and lives on the line for kin; who purchased one another’s freedom; who resisted colonization by surviving in the beloved places that colonizers feared to tread. We are their descendants, carrying their courage and their dreams as a north star guiding us home.

We are the inheritors of this resistance. Our ancestors raised stones, machetes, bricks, prayers, fists—for land and space, for kin, for freedom, to exist. Today, we carry those dreams forward, forging spaces of sanctuary and imagination in a time when our people face emboldened hatred, fascism, and ongoing genocide.

Our Vision and Our Work

T2W centers land return and reparations, and the ability of QTBIPOC to access spaces to create, rest, and dream as a direct intervention to the violence of empire, colonization, and enslavement enacted upon Black and Indigenous people and their descendants, as well as the violence of the cisheteropatriarchy. In this time of genocide, fascism, and emboldened hatred against our people, it is vitally important for us to have safe spaces to be together, dream, and heal. This is how we practice redistribution—of land, time, and creative power—as part of a living solidarity economy.

Our work is guided by five long-term core goals, which will be implemented as our build-out reaches completion:

• Land Sovereignty: Establishing a permanent land trust stewarded by QTBIPOC  with roots in the regions that our sites are located in. These sites are established in rural and urban areas where QTBIPOC can gather, create, and exist in right relationship with the land. Through establishing a land trust, we ensure community governance and collective ownership into perpetuity for a community that has endured systemic injustices around housing stability, as well as access to spaces for rest, creative practice, and healing.

• Stewarding the Earth: Preserving and cultivating seeds, prioritizing native and genocide-endangered plant relatives. We do this by creating community gardens and sharing knowledge of land care through inviting community to co-steward the land with us, workshops, and offering land stewardship fellowships to QTBIPOC.

• Rest and Creative Residencies: Offering no-cost residencies at our sites for QTBIPOC, who are systematically denied access to rest, residencies in the creative sectors, and spaces to heal. Sites will have studios, equipment, and spaces to support dance, visual arts, music, and interdisciplinary practices. Additionally, the New Orleans site will have a small venue for sharing work.  

• Disaster Resilience: Serving as a refuge and recovery hub, especially for QTBIPOC who face heightened vulnerability during climate disasters.

• Healing and Spiritual Care: Providing spaces where QTBIPOC can access culturally relevant healing services, spiritual practices, and wellness resources.

Launch and Implementation

T2W is launching with an incubation and infrastructure-building phase beginning in 2025. During this time, we are raising $4 million that will allow us to plan, build, and carry us through our first year of programming. After this phase, T2W will begin to offer:

• Year-long fellowships to QTBIPOC interested in land stewardship at each site

• Three- to six-month creative and rest residencies for QTBIPOC artists and organizers, respectively

• Seed libraries and community gardens accessible to QTBIPOC and all neighborhood residents

• Community hubs and studio spaces for QTBIPOC artists, organizers, and healers as well as performance space 

• QTBIPOC healing justice practitioner services and access to various healing modalities and appropriate spiritual care

• Refuge and recovery centers for neighborhood residents and QTBIPOC during climate or other crises

This work is led by an intergenerational circle of queer and trans Black and Indigenous stewards with roots in the lands our sites are located in, from our early 20s to mid-40s, the majority of whom are trans and gender nonconforming. Together, we carry the sacred commitment of building a future our ancestors and descendants would recognize as freedom.

Why Now

We are living in a moment defined by anti-trans and anti-queer bigotry, White supremacy, and the rise of fascism. At the same time, climate change and economic inequality are displacing entire communities, deepening precarity for those who were already most vulnerable.

In such a moment, spaces like T2W are not a luxury–they are a necessity,an act of resistance, and a seed of a new, regenerative economy rooted in collectivism, where wealth is measured not in dollars hoarded but in the flourishing of our people, the stewarding of our land and culture, and the thriving of our shared imagination. 

In contributing to this solidarity economy, T2W builds upon the long lineage of collective care that has sustained QTBIPOC communities for generations—from mutual aid and pleasure clubs to community giving circles, house-party fundraisers, and bail-out actions.

In bringing forth this project and this vision, T2W offers an antidote to the theft of our time, creativity, and life force by racial capitalism, the cisheteropatriarchy, and fascism. 

A Holy Invitation for Philanthropy

The wealth that makes philanthropy possible exists because of stolen land and stolen labor. The White supremacist and colonial paradigm has dictated how philanthropy operates—giving minimally, demanding proof, waiting for the perfect conditions, and moving too slowly while our communities continue to suffer, because of the continued investments that philanthropy makes in military, surveillance technologies, and industries that destroy our air, lands, and waters.

Philanthropy has a choice to make. It can continue to uphold the extractive standards and practices of the past—or it can step into right relationship with movement organizations like T2W, recognizing that we don’t have the time to wait. We ask funders to invest not only in our work but in a new paradigm. To see freedom spaces that center rest, creativity, healing, and belonging for QTBIPOC not as optional, but as urgent solutions that will exist far beyond this political moment. Reparative funding is not radical—it is necessary. 

We invite philanthropy to give boldly to support the new worlds we are building and want to see exist, and to give more than 5% of their endowments; to honor frontline expertise of communities with lived experience; to fund outside the c3 structure; and to move capital that reflects trust, speed, and reciprocity.

In Closing

In my lineage, every prayer, every memory, every story begins with water. So too does this one. We invite you to begin with us. To join us in making a new world where all of us can be free, where our cultures thrive, where our imaginations are limitless.

May we remember that we are unstoppable. May we continue to create new worlds when they try to tear ours down. May we all find our way to freedom. May we all find our way home.