TxT Tentacles 2024-2025
Overview
With this grant, the TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT) will focus on concrete steps to liberate the building by organizing a grassroots campaign through community meetings with coalition organizations (such as local queer/trans arts and services groups and non-profit Tenderloin organizations) and individuals (such as local activists, academics and artists). Additionally, we will engage in the collaborative envisioning of the building’s future through gathering neighborhood residents’ oral histories and organizing participatory design workshops. This work will be showcased in local art galleries along with public programs. The intended social outcome is to transform the site into an uncooptable collectively-owned space that honors its queer/trans anticarceral legacy and provides a trans-centered space for activities and support. Both the grassroots liberation campaign and the collective envisioning workshops will be made possible through having a physical space in the Tenderloin and support from a salaried community organizer.
Through the Tentacles grant, the TurkxTaylor Initiative aims to achieve two main goals:
1. Envisioning Project
We will collaboratively create an uncooptable vision for the building of Compton’s former site at the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, one that aligns with its history of resistance. By engaging in oral histories, participatory workshops, surveys, and interviews, we will partner with queer/trans people of color who have been incarcerated, who are unhoused, and those currently living inside 111 Taylor to ensure their voices and experiences are central in shaping the future of this site.
Oral Histories
Participatory Workshops
Surveys/Interviews with 111 Taylor St residents
2. Campaign Advocacy
We will provide political education and legal support to trans-centered, Tenderloin-based organizations and individuals invested in the site’s past and future, with the goal of building a cross-movement coalition to liberate the historic site called Compton’s Coalition. Through offering the space to learn together and gather socially we want to build an alternative relationality rooted in solidarity and collective care in a way that reflects the utopian space that Compton’s once was.
Political Education/Social Gatherings
Legal Advice
Community Land Trust
Historic Commemoration
This project is made possible with the support of the TEN:TACLES Initiative