The Liberation House! Building a Movement for Joy, Healing and Holistic Energy
“Cultural workers understand that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transferred to create movement.” -Jonathan Lykes
The Liberation House seeks to create sacred spaces where Black and Indigenous, Queer and Trans people can joyfully live out their self-determined lives without limitation or barriers. We seek to plant the seeds for multi-generational liberation efforts to cultivate joy, healing justice, transformation and cultural production. We work to confront systemic oppression through building power, organizing direct actions, and connecting global safe houses and cultural worker sites for political education and advocacy.
The Liberation House envisions a world where Black and Indigenous, Queer and Trans people have safe houses to experience complete political, economic and social freedom, and no longer experience harm, suffering or any form of systemic oppression.
Values
At the liberation house we create culture. We do this in direct contestation to the social order of dehumanization, alienation and othering through criminality, punishment, and control. By using cultural production as a vessel to freedom, we will get our community closer to joyfully living out our self-determined lives without limitations or barriers.
We seek to transform the energy in our individual spaces and have them be consumed by collective holistic energy to tap into the radical imaginations of artist and cultural workers organizing in Black and Brown communities.
Let’s be clear. Without joy, we won’t win in 2020 or beyond. Without joy, we won’t survive. Without joy, we will never heal. And without joy, we can’t love radically. But through the experience of Black joy, we will conjure up dreams of freedom that our ancestors will be proud of.
Learning and growing are the results of struggle. Struggle causes change and liberation. As an initiative we strive to engage in Principled Struggle (attributed to NTanya Lee) and work to foster and cultivate spaces for members, coalitions, and communities to move through conflict in a way that makes us better. To do this, we each commit to: Being honest and direct while maintaining compassion. Taking responsibility for our own feelings and actions. Seeking deeper understanding. (We ask and read first). Considering social positions and how they inform response to conflict.
We center those who stand at the frontlines of marginalization. Specifically, queer, trans*, femme, poor, disabled and undocumented bodies are the ones most vulnerable, so we seek to lead and create culture with those multiple and complex idenetites standing at the intersection of oppression and liberation.
Attributed to Cara Page, Healing Justice is a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds. Through this framework we continue to build political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation movements and organizations.
We believe that when we know better, we will do better. At the Liberation House we seek to lead with reading and learning. And through our political education and equity training we work to move beyond an equity only approach, to achieve true liberation.