Welcome to this medicine bundle, titled “what we are willing to do for each other: an introduction to a village artist grant system.”

To begin, I want to acknowledge who I am, where I’m coming from, and as a result, who this system is and isn’t for.

I’m Shaunga.

I’ve been developing this vision for a really long time – longer than I knew what I was actually doing.

I’ve spent the last few years intentionally building its foundation.

If you don’t know me, I am a theatre artist, or rather a practitioner of Ancestor Theatre and Celestial Theatre. My stages and stories are altars for Ancestors to move, heal and evolve. I’m trained in this technique by experienced mentors and elders, and it’s also my gift and my calling that I’ve carried since I was a child.

I’m a trained Ceremonialist, an Altar Carrier, adopted and initiated into the Pachakuti Mesa tradition, under the guidance of my teacher Dr. G. Love (Geryll Robinson) and her incredible vision, Soulshifting Retreats.

The Soulshifting community that I’m a part of is big, wide, deep community of incredible healers, artists and activists especially invested in protecting Black and Indigenous liberation, building cross cultural solidarity, ending rape culture, uplifting survivors and sex workers, all the while bringing forth our most magical gifts and earth steward traditions found in our lineage and personal healing journeys…protecting the health and thriving of our planet as a priority.

In terms of my particular gifts – I’m an experienced Spiritual Diagnostician and Energetic Surgeon.

That’s like a specialized form of Energy Healer – just like surgery is a specialized practise in the medical world.

I’m also a writer, astrologer, animal communicator, community organizer, teacher, and a powerful medium and oracle.

I’m a huge nerd. I have a lot of knowledge across many different metaphysical traditions and arts disciplines. I’m a never ending student.

I’m Bengali. I’m queer. I’m multi-gendered. My queer and trans ancestors are my most powerful and protected Ancestors. I give time, attention and devotion to many different kinds of Ancestors, including my blood lineage, chosen family, adopted spiritual family, my soul lineages, star lineages, as well as our primordial Ancestors like the water, trees, mountains, and the elements.

I have a very special relationship with Animals, including the handful of animals I’m lucky to have shared a life with here on Earth, and the animal kingdom at large – in body and in spirit.

If I’ve done one thing in my life more than anything else, it’s that I’ve devoted my time to my personal healing journey, and my love story with the Universe.

I mean, I think the actual thing I’ve done more than anything else in life is try to be a good friend.

To my animals, to the land, to the spirit of love, death and time – and yeah, to humans too. But that is pretty much what devotion to an Ancestor Healing journey boils down to anyway – friendship.

This Village Artist Grant system is a massive project that will take time to grow, but that can certainly grow efficiently and powerfully in the next few years. There are many doors for different kinds of people to enter, participate, give and receive.

I don’t claim ownership over this system, but I do claim stewardship.

That means, the blueprint and spirit of this system is meant to spread, like dandelion seeds. I want any and every interested party to study the system and apply it to your own situation. I appreciate credit where credit is due, and I also want you to adapt and evolve what I’ve created here, which I’ll also be doing as time goes on.

At the same time, if anyone wants to come through my doors, work with me directly, eat from the food I grow, there has to be some fundamental recognition, respect and reciprocity for my stewardship.

The space I hold around me, which is also where I also live, die, grieve, grow and participate is not a free for all.

That’s what I mean when I say there are some criteria regrading who this granting system is and isn’t for.

To weave closely with me, you must hold a great respect for the Spirit World in your own way. This is not a space where we impose our spiritual beliefs and traditions onto others, but it is a place to nurture, develop and protect our birth right to explore our otherworldly spiritual and creative gifts, especially as they get more wild and adventurous.

This is a place to hold our growth, creativity and spirituality accountable to our sovereign, self-determined integrity, and also in solidarity with the healing of the world, our non-human relatives, and with communities most impacted by genocide, colonialism, white supremacy, anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness.

Here, we honour the promise of a Free P/alestine. I name this community explicitly because there is still so much contention and polarity around this issue. This is a space for P/alestine and P/alestinians to get free, and also for anti-Zi0onist Jewish people who want their lives and livelihood respected alongside a Free P/alestine.

This is a sex worker positive space, one that honours the wisdom of queer, trans, poly, and kink communities. I find this also important to name because there’s still so much stigma here, especially in spiritual communities. Sometimes it surprises me, how many progressive leaning spiritual people still have whorephobic and politically conservative attitudes toward queerness, expansive gender roles, abundant relationship styles and sex in general.

I’m going to challenge carceral culture and caste-ism wherever I find it, including in myself. I am going to protect the labour of femmes, trans people, racialized folks, community caregivers, healers, and our right to be paid fairly and lusciously. I am going to champion and advocate for artists, writers and storytellers – ensuring we thrive in our unique and weird way of doing things, that we are understood as essential workers in a liberation movement. I’m going to challenge conscious and subconscious cultural patterns that encourage exploitation and dehumanization of artists and healers.

This is a space to honour disability justice, and protect the sovereignty and livelihood of disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent folks.

In saying all of this, I will always prioritize an ancestor healing perspective on every justice movement. I believe an ancestor healing perspective on anything right now is one of the most valuable, life changing assets we have.

But, if you hold fundamental beliefs that things like mediumship or different kinds of ancestor communication is inherently untrustworthy, it will be difficult or impossible for you to sit close to me.

I also want to note – that many conversations I’m having with myself, and that I want to share with others, are incredibly complex. I have a lot of feelings about what we as a culture do and don’t do with money.

I’m holding a lot of pain, rage and grief inside of me that I’m learning how to tend to on a deeper level, which comes up especially when I see patterns amongst spiritual or activist communities that have hurt me repeatedly, and that I also believe stop us from offering a more powerful solidarity to communities currently surviving extreme military violence and genocide.

I haven’t always, and cannot not always express complex ideas and emotions in a way that clearly communicates the truth of what I’m trying to say, especially when I’m in process. I see a lot of people in process of visioning and attempting to communicate complexity, and not always in a way that everyone understands.

Thus I ask for spaciousness and curiosity around complex, nuanced conversations. I strive to show up with generosity, compassion, respect for myself and others, and I want to be in conversation with others who strive to do the same.

Those are some of the core values I hold around me. You decide if you’re swimming in the same water, and if this system is for you. I’m always open to conversation where conversation is generative, but you should know that there are some things I’m not willing to fight about.

That said, I welcome anyone who wants to sit in circle with me, if you feel nourished by my voice, values and presence. It doesn’t matter where you are in your spiritual development, decolonizing journey, or if you consider yourself an artist – you can be a beginning, emerging, experienced, or anywhere in between.

Lastly I will say, if you are committed to some kind of allegiance to the American Dream, or the Canadian Dream, and that’s where you hope to find success and livelihood, my medicine will bring you down into a deeper more authentic Dream, a promise that many of us made to our Ancestors about how we truly want to spend our time here, while we have it.

For some, you might not like how that feels. For others, it is everything you need to sit in circle with.

If at this point you’re still like, hell yeah…let’s keep going. Then let’s keep going.

Here’s a little overview of what’s in the following sections of this bundle, which I’ve separated into nine village voice notes, aka sections. I hope you enjoy listening the same way you do when your bestie sends you a series of 30-minute podcast episodes aka voice notes on your phone updating you on the details of their day. I’ve included a written transcript with each voice note as well.

In section two and four I share my vision of what collective “money moving workshops” can look like that feed into a Village Artist Grant system.

In section three I talk about the principle we center in order to determine how and why we raise money for any circumstance: to protect the integrity of our personal and collective healing journeys. This is the core principle that the entire village system is built around.

Section five, I’ll zoom out to the bigger picture: what kind of liberation is possible with a system like this, that otherwise wouldn’t be?

In section six, I’ll talk about investors. In section seven, I’ll take you through a three part tour of my garden – aka how you can participate and enjoy the harvest of the system as I grow it. In section eight, I’ll talk about the entry portal and how to get involved. Finally, I’ll touch on some easter eggs and a very special dedication in section nine.

That’s it for this voice note. I’ll see you the next one – “the money moving workshop – part one.”

Alright, let’s come back to this fundamental question: how do we make this happen for each other? Let’s talk about the Money Moving Workshop.

The Money Moving Workshop is hosted by THE SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK, which is a Storyteller, Producer and Showrunner’s Guild that I have been quietly putting together and launching in the last year.

This is a section of my creative company and storytelling school, Otherworldly Giants.

The SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK is designed to answer the question – what would a producer’s guild look like if we brought this sacred role back to the village, and divested from what these spaces have turned into in hollywood or mainstream arts institutions?

A big answer to this question is not just an answer, it’s a movement – designed to bring the power of public funding back to the village. Here, we train ourselves to do what big hollywood studio do, but we do it in the ancestor’s way, the thriving village way.

As we get off the ground, I want to tell you about my vision for a Village Producer Program, hosted by the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK.

The heart of this program really excites me. If one has dreams to make a living as an artist, we’re trained to chase Hollywood. We’re trained to pitch to big corporate execs and hollywood studios, we’re trained to figure out how to get your foot in the door.

Outside of hollywood, we’re trained to do that with big publishing companies, and arts institutions. When we apply for grants, we have to build that skill set – we pitch to a nameless, faceless jury who will then decide if we’ve explained our artistic merit, viability, and workplan clearly enough to get funding.

But in a Village Artist Grant system, we learn how to take our power back as Producers. What does being a Producer look like, when you’re centering healing and liberation? What is the role that the Producer played in the days of a thriving village, because they were there.

If we don’t have to pitch to rich, white, male, executives, or an unknown granting jury – can we pitch to each other?

So here’s what I’m imagining part of our Pilot Producer program can look like:

I’m looking for the first handful of folks to partner with as “Associate Producers.” I’ll work with you to set up a Money Moving Workshop. This is where we’ll do our first big experiments in generating beautiful, bountiful village artist grants with amazing people, for amazing people.

The ideal “Associate Producer” is someone who already has public visibility, a platform and an audience they can activate into this mission – ie the mission of bringing the right, responsibility and power of public funding back to the village.

Your platform doesn’t have to be online or on social media. You just need to have access to people, that you can activate with the right tools and support.

The ideal person is someone who believes wholeheartedly in a village public funding mission. The first thing to do is go through this medicine bundle, and feel what parts of it really speak to you.

When I partner with an Associate Producer, I sit with you and I take you through a personalized training.

We go through the parts of this mission that are lighting you up, and combine that with the advocacy or community building you’re already doing on your platform. Then together we create the structure and content of a Money Moving Workshop – ie an irresistible pitch to invite folks in your audience into this movement, vision and practise.

This can look like a 5-10 day social media campaign ending with a special online event for your investors.

The pitch to your audience will be designed to activate and inspire folks to contribute a monetary amount to this campaign from their “field of generosity.”

A “field” is language we use as energy healers and Ceremonialists. The definition of a field in this context is basically a specified place in the time-space continuum – it exists inside of you and also in the world and multiple realms of existence.

“Generosity” is a field that we can tap into, within ourselves, in the world and in all dimensions.

When you spend money from your field of generosity – the amount you give is self-determined, according to your circumstances and lived experience.

For some people a generous amount is $25. For some, it’s $5000. Generosity means you’re being generous to yourself, your financial situation, your fellow village members, and our collective desire to return to a thriving village way of life.

Generosity means you don’t give too much at the expense of your needs and well-being. It’s also not holding on and hoarding too much in places you have more to share.

Part of the experiment I want to see, is what happens when many people in an audience give from their generosity, regardless of what that number is.

As an Associate Producer, during our training I will support you to self-determine what you want to use the money we raise, as long as it aligns with the underlying principle behind this system – that the money must go toward supporting the integrity of your self-determined healing journey.

This is a major, foundational component of our Village Artist Granting System. It answers the core question – what are we actually funding and why?

Since this is such an important principle, I’m going to take a moment and break it down in the next voice note.

When I work with an Associate Producer, part of our training is helping you discern what kind of Village Grant you are generating. Village Grants can be for a project, business, for your livelihood, for urgent matters, for common milestones and gateways in the Ancestor healing journey, or whatever the integrity of your personal healing journey looks like.

This is where I bring my gift and experience as a healer, a coach, a guide, a spiritual diagnostician, a reader, and an oracle.

Why do we see healers? You see a healer when you feel confused, lost, unclear, something is going on in life and you can’t figure it out. You seek divination. You seek therapy. You seek wise council. You seek support.

We also see Healers on important milestones. Not always when we’re struggling – sometimes when we want an extra blessing. When we want to celebrate. Birthdays, Anniversaries, New Adventures.

Maybe we seek healing because we simply love serving and being served. We love supporting and being supported. We love being part of a communal culture that nurtures & celebrates the ongoing development of our gifts.

We see Healers when we’re crossing huge milestones – the death of a loved one. Falling in love and not wanting to fuck it up.

Healers of Integrity know that our job isn’t to tell you what to do, or know you better than you know yourself. Our job is to help you illuminate the truth.

For example, from a theatre perspective – there’s a reason why we have directors and dramaturgs and audiences. If you’re on stage, you’re in it. You can’t always see yourself clearly. We always need people to recognize us, to reflect back. To remind us. Especially when we are doused with so much colonial conditioning.

Healers will tell you what they see – your gifts, the season of life you’re in, the energy around you, wounds you might be acting out, patterns you’re repeating. They’ll help you see how you’re getting in your own way, and they’ll help you find the path that gets you out of it, that gets you free.

In the days of the thriving village, after a healing session, you wouldn’t just be thrown back into the world left to fend for yourself. Your village would gather around you and ensure that you have the support you need to stay accountable to the integrity of your healing journey, as you continue to determine it.

Right now, it’s not that we don’t have the desire to do that for each other. It’s not that many of us don’t already do that in many ways.

But we also don’t have near enough good systems in place to uphold this, to grow it, to deepen in.

For example, say I sat at my Altar, and spoke to my Ancestors. I said – I’m having x y z problem, I feel like I’m just going in circles in life, I can’t seem to move forward, what do I do? And they said:

“Shaunga, you need to go on a 40 day and 40 night rest retreat before you start a new project, new relationships, or anything new. You need a dedicated ritual designed to help your entire holistic body process the last 10 years of enormous transformation.”

If you’ve been following along, I’ve spoken about this before, this is actually true. This is a protocol that I do really need to follow as part of my spiritual practise that I haven’t been able to do fully. But when the message was given to me, it hit me in the bones. Like, I know how true that is.

It brought me to exploring what “Rest” really means for me right now. You automatically think that rest means having the opportunity to sleep all day. Not necessarily. I can’t properly rest in the city I’m in.

Part of what my body needs to rest…is to move more.

If I’m really being honest about what rest means to me – I need to be able to grieve. I need to release a lot of stored grief I’ve been holding for many years. To do that, I need to be around big elements of nature. I need to go see the whales. I need to be close to big mountains, big bodies of water, and just breathe together.

The other part of what would actually help me rest – I need to have more fun in my social life. There’s nothing more restful, than spending a day with people that you have amazing, magical, friendship chemistry with – laughing, telling stories, just witnessing each other. Spending time in really good company, that’s the rest I need.

But my season of life, I’m in the starting over place of a complete overhaul of my relationship body, my ancestral body, an inevitably, my social life.

How do you repair your social life after spending years transforming your inherited relationship DNA at the deepest level? How do you make new friends in your 40s? There isn’t a how-to manual. You just have to put yourself out there, and try. You have to prioritize your wisdom, all the relationship lessons you’ve learned. You have to hold your boundaries, and your high standards. I’m not 13 anymore. Back then I was like, sure I guess I’ll just sit with you guys at the lunch table, I’m not picky, I just want people to sit with. Now I’m like, I’m very picky about who I sit with. And that’s appropriate for where I am in life.

See everything that came out of this healing session is very much a confirmation of how much my heart and spirit needs to follow thriving village protocols wherever I am, in whatever I do. Before you move onto something new, you always need an end of life ritual. That’s what that rest retreat would be for. You can’t just move on to the new thing without taking the time for integration.

The next step would be to imagine, how do I make that happen?

A Thriving Village Artist Grant system would say – you need an artist grant for this essential, end of life ritual. You need an artist grant designed to protect and celebrate your willingness to start over in life. To try and find new friends. To try and repair your social life. The grant isn’t for – I’m gonna make sure I heal my social life, the grant is just to try.

In the village, we recognize, that in itself is a process that needs to be fully supported, regardless of how long it takes, or what the outcome is. When we fully support the process, it doesn’t matter if after 6 months I still haven’t found any new friends.

The point is, that I did something good with the time that I had, and the time that I did have, was supported.

When I say, we don’t currently have good enough systems in place to protect the integrity of your healing journey, this is what I mean.

Other systems will say – okay now that we’ve illuminated the truth, let’s see if we can find an artist grant you can apply for that would support you to travel more. That’s time consuming. Who knows if something like that exists that I’m eligible for. If I do apply, who knows if I’ll get it, how long it will take. And I will 100% have to change the integrity of what I actually need to turn it into a program with measurable deliverables that I could actually get funding for.

Not to mention, the further I’ve gone in my Ancestor healing journey, the more inaccessible writing and applying for these grants have become for me, but we’ll talk about that more another time.

Another system will say – okay just figure out how to fund what you need via entrepreneurship. Let’s help you figure out how to launch some sort of program, so that you can host and provide something for a group of folks, so they can pay you for an experience, so we can all travel together, and grieve and rest together…and hopefully I attract people who might become really good friends, but I can’t actually put that expectation on you because you’re paying me, that would create a really weird dynamic, so I’m just like crossing my fingers hoping that maybe it’ll naturally happen…and now I’m not really resting because I’m low key stressed and focused on making sure this is a good experience for you, so you feel like you get your money’s worth.

A Village Artist Granting System is designed to help us cut it out! Let’s be more straightforward with one another, about what we really need and why.

A Thriving Village Artist Grant system remembers that we cannot rely on entrepreneurship alone for financial sustainability. That is a lie that capitalism sold us. You can see that in trying to apply some sort of entrepreneurship model onto what I really need, I’ve already lost the integrity of it, and I’m already exhausted.

Okay, but let me indulge the voices saying, you could still make that work via entrepreneurship.

Let’s talk about it.

How about this one: figure out how to monetize your gifts and sell your services in a way that allows you to generate enough income to live with a great amount of spaciousness, so you have the time and resources to travel, rest and grieve as much as you need.

That is what most business coaches would tell me to do, and it is what honestly works for a lot of people.

If I were to make that work for me, my best option given my personal circumstances would be to focus my efforts on pitching myself as a high paid consultant to high paying clients. Realistically, I would need a very small roster of clients who can pay 4 or 5 figures each month to make it all work out.

Now, it’s actually possible for me to do that. I could make that work, if I really wanted to.

But I’ll tell you why I haven’t chosen that road, it’s because it leaves my heart hollow.

Capitalism has taught us that the only way to make a living, is to buy and sell. Thus, Capitalism continues, if at any moment you lose your ability to buy and sell, you literally deserve to die.

In a thriving village model – entrepreneurship does have a sacred space in public life, yes. The marketplace is incredibly sacred. But it is not responsible for public funding. It is not responsible for essential services that keep a village alive. It is not the determining factor for whether you live or die.

So much of my work revolves around creating a public library. This I’ve done mostly on my podcast, Otherworldly Giants, the divination channel.

I want a lot of content creators to think about yourself like that. Many people, especially young people are creating amazing popular education on your platforms. You’re designing and curating a public library. You’re running an independent school. You deserve public funding for that.

Just for that. Not – now that you’ve realized you have something that people want, you have to take seven extra steps to figure out how to turn it into an entrepreneurship. No, no, back it up, back it up.

You deserve funding JUST for the library, period.

I deserve public funding for my library, and my storyteller’s apothecary. How about, the thriving village reminds us that small businesses deserve public funding even as you buy and sell things. You deserve public funding when you start up, when you’re closing down, during slow seasons, during times of family emergencies, or sickness, or just taking time off as a regular practise.

If everyone agreed that figuring out how to help everyone run successful entrepreneurships was our best answer, we would be turning our backs on important, available opportunities to practise deeper thriving village principles when it comes to how we share and exchange money.

I do believe that if we don’t start investing in building those skills at a much greater commitment and capacity right now, that will cause us, as a human species, many dire problems down the road, not to mention for our planet.

So to recap, a Village Artist Granting System is designed to

1) help you self-determine and honour the specificity of what you actually need in any given moment

2) put money DIRECTLY on what that is

3) in a timely, efficient manner

By no means am I saying this kind of system should replace entrepreneurship. But it does need to be the ground underneath it. That way, we can actually reclaim the joy and fun and wild ride of running a business, and feed our wealth into a healing economy, rather than just more capitalism.

Here I can say: hey village, I need an Artist Grant to rest, to travel, to heal myself, to dream, to grieve, and to heal my social life in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t always know how I’m supposed to do that, but I do know how to follow my gut. That’s the integrity of my healing journey in this moment.

Then we would design a Money Moving Workshop to generate the funds that protect my integrity, and invite regular people into that world as investors – because you have a stake in wanting to return to live like this too.

Tomorrow, you might want to wake up and know that you’re connected to a village system, where you could ask for the simplicity of what you need, and it would be well received. You have access to a developing culture where we all get to live like this.

You can probably feel right now that this system is designed to nurture, protect, and resource you, AND ALSO confront you, and challenge you.

Some of you might be feeling concerns or hesitations emerge. Hold on, I don’t know, what about this, how would that actually work?

The emergence of those question is the point. This is our invitation to develop that research. Let’s go into those questions, open them up, do surgery, with the goal of always returning to thriving village principles.

When I work with an Associate Producer – you might feel hesitations and fears come up. What about this issue? Will my community really back me on this?

Whatever comes up, my job is to Olivia Pope that shit and always bring us back to village principles, instead of the white house (laughs)

We take the issues coming up, and we craft them into our sincere pitch: an opportunity to invite us into deeper, more generous village practises.

For example, as I’m sharing this with you, I’m feeling a narrative emerge steeped in what colonialism and capitalism have instilled in us as core values.

That it is absolutely audacious to come to a community of people and say, I really need to rest. Can you give me money for that?

How dare we do that for each other? How dare we be so selfish? How dare we be such free loaders?

(That’s an incredibly racist, classist term by the way.)

It’s far more respectable if I found some non profit organization, or billionaire philanthropist, or corporation who gave me money to rest.

If I told you, I applied for a grant, they gave me money just to rest, on my own terms, with no strings attached. You’d be like, oh my god, that is so cool, how do I get in on that too? How do I work the system like that?

But to come to a village directly and ask for it? Why is that so audacious?

Because you’re thinking about a million reasons for why you should trust me, or trust anyone who would ask for such a thing. Why should you give your money to my personal healing journey?

Let me give you two scenarios:

Scenario One – I partner with someone who has a large platform. I come on that platform and I say – I experienced a major injury at work because I fell asleep on the job. Maybe I fell asleep at the wheel and got into a car accident. Or maybe I was diagnosed with a major illness and I am required to stop working for a few weeks and rest or else I’ll probably die. Will you help me cover my rent so that I don’t die? While you send anything you have, please, I’m begging you. I don’t have any other options left and I’m desperate.

A lot of people wouldn’t have a problem “donating” to me in a crisis. Of course some people would say, it’s your fault you fell asleep at the wheel. Some people would ignore me. But a lot of people would feel sorry for me, they would be activated by my desperation, and they’d feel really good about helping me out in a crisis.

Scenario Two – I partner with someone who has a large platform. We do a training together, and we realize that I need to go on this 40 day rest retreat – BEFORE things get really bad. We come to you and say, hey village, I need to rest, to travel, to dream, to play, to grieve. Can you put in something into the pot? I want to get on top of this. I want to be responsible for my health before anything gets worse. But also because that’s my joy in life.

In a thriving village practise – we don’t see either of these asks as a burden. Coming to each other for support for our livelihood, in times of good or bad, is an honour, it’s a right, it’s a responsibility, and it’s our power.

By challenging ourselves to give to each other in this way, we’re disrupting a saviour complex rooted in the colonial charity model. We’re trained to only “donate” to each other when we can prove our suffering, when you see me as some kind of poor unfortunate soul.

What I challenge you to remember, is that when I am fully supported in my healing journey, what I can then offer back to my village is PHENOMENAL.

The lessons, the insights, the contribution, the invention, the opportunities, all of the magic that will inevitably arise from 40 days of rest. The village gets to have me at my best. And not on a verge of a breakdown or crisis.

In the process, we become phenomenal possibility models and accountability partners for each other. Phenomenal mirrors. We remind each other of what really matters in life. We re-member the parts of ourselves that capitalism has taken away from us.

Why shouldn’t we pay each other to have fun with our friends? Why shouldn’t we organize to make that happen for each other? That’s badass. Also because too many of you are applying for grants thinking of all kinds of deliverables you can promise your funders, when you really want an excuse to hang out with really cool people.

Why shouldn’t we train ourselves to put money on what really matters to us, as a human species?

Here’s an example of what you could get a village grant for:

• starting, growing or maintaining an audience on social media, patreon or substack, or working with a financial coach, business coach or social media coach – pausing here to say, millions of people are trying to build an audience around their art, voice, wisdom, gifts, in order to make money – but what if we financially supported the process of building? In other words, what if you could be financially supported, while you figured out how to make money? What a revelation!

How about this one:

• closing a business, ending a relationship or chapter of life (again, pause to say imagine – that a business you’ve been running for years has run its course. Instead of seeing that as a failure, see it as a monumental success. A celebration of everything you accomplished and learned. We see that moment as a failure because we’re not making enough money to keep the lights on. But in this system you could be financially supported in the process of not making money anymore, ie the process of grieving, resting, integrating, and imagining what you could do next. What a revelation!!)

Here are some more examples of what you could get village grant funding for:

• studying your dreams

• getting out of an abusive relationship

• parenting

• animal companionship or land stewardship

• hanging out in nature for as long as you need

• going door to door for sudan, learning about what’s happening in the congo, or calling your representative all day for p/alestine

• supporting an elder of any species

• holding a loved one and just being there as they transition

• going on super mad scientist research mode for weeks on end even when you make no sense to anyone except the future

• recovering from, or living through an illness

• nerding out about a topic you love or developing your spiritual gifts without the pressure of turning every thing into a product, service or program you have to sell

• sitting at the altar in silence

• going on an adventure when you have no idea where you’ll end up or why

• lounging around and reading

• studying with your favourite teacher or elder

• hosting queer, kinky, survivor-centered, ancestor-honouring sex parties (or is that one just me?)

These are all things that commonly come up in our healing sessions. As you listen to this bundle, feel free to pause here if you feel inspired to journal about some of the things you would want funding for right now, if you were surrounded by a village happy to resource the integrity of your healing.

The things that come up for what we really need to heal in any given moment are often strange, open ended, so specific, sometimes unexpected, but inevitable.

The Spirit behind this system really wants to be able to turn to our village in these moments, instead of running around exhausting ourselves doing everything but. This system is willing to try and find a way to come closer to a type of communal healing everyone is aching for.

How do you think it would heal you, if the Village helped you raise an artist grant to support you while you went through a heartbreaking divorce? If your village supported you with something that you were sure you had to just figure out by yourself?

Of course, Village Grants can be generated for regular things like funding your most revolutionary, essential art projects, a business start-up fund, for research and writing…but at a much greater strength, capacity and HEART than what other funding bodies could do for you now.

All of this to say: when I work with an Associate Producer, part of my job is to help you self-determine what you need money for, according to your integrity.

Then I support you to learn how to talk about this, put a language, framework and pitch around it, to activate and inspire your community to make this happen for you, and for all of us.

And my oh my, look at what we’re doing quietly and not so quietly – dismantling our current financial system. Take that, Hamilton the Musical! Including how it exists in our subconscious, and through actual dollars. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that?

Come back for the next section, we’ll talk about the Money Moving Workshop part two.

A Money Moving Workshop can take as little as a week. We would design what the structure looks like on a case by case basis.

Let’s say you are an online content creator with a substantial audience. As Associate Producer, we would spend 2-3 days in a creative portal on zoom, creating content for your unique campaign. Then we could spend 6-10 days activating your audience into an incredible vision, where at the end they’ll attend an amazing online event, and contribute a monetary amount from their field of generosity.

When you apply for regular grants, you usually have to pour an annoying amount of free labour into writing the thing, wait an annoying amount of time before you find out if you got it, and there’s no guarantee that you will.

Here, we’re not just creating a Village Artist Grant System, we’re creating a rapid-fire system.

This isn’t like throwing your heart and guts aka your art baby into a void and hoping the money will come through.

During the entire Money Moving Workshop, I’ll still act as your coach, your guide, and essentially your “Big Dog.” If we run into problems, we recalibrate, adjust, find innovative solutions, and we keep trying until we feel complete.

I’m also not a secret. The campaign also can involve me coming on, answering questions, creating content together, wherever that feels good.

Alright, so say we run a successful campaign. What are the protocols around how we organize the money?

When I work with an Associate Producer, we split what we raise by the rule of thirds that are found in many Ancestor Healing traditions – you keep some, I keep some, and some goes back to the Ancestors.

This means, what we’re doing in one Money Moving Workshop is creating 3 big village grants.

One will go back to me, ie growing the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK. One will go to whatever you self-determine you want the money for. The last third we’ll offer to a cause that we both care about.

What’s really cool about the SPLIT, is that these three big grants can then be split into several other smaller grants.

For example, let’s say 800 people were activated in a Money Moving Workshop and were inspired to give something from their field of generosity. For some people that number was higher, for some it was lower. On average it came out to $375 per person. That’s 300,000 in 10 days and we split that in three.

With my 100,000 I could say – I’m creating a village grant to support a few months of my livelihood expenses. I’ll also create 3 village grants for artists who I’m working with directly. I would also put aside chunk for a local Afro-Indigenous land stewardship project.

As Associate Producer, you determine what you want to do with your share. Maybe you also keep a chunk aside for a few months of your livelihood expenses. Maybe you put some toward hiring a part time assistant but pay them more than part time wages so they have extra space to rest and grieve, which they desperately need. And maybe you offer some to the single mama in your neighbourhood so she has lunch covered for the next 3 months.

With the third 100K we decide we want this money to go toward mothers currently surviving genocide. This could even go toward supporting an organizer to do that research and logistical labour – to find really good collectives who can get money to folks on the ground for this cause.

Do you see how our original 3-way split will inevitably start to snowball into more village grants, spreading to more places, supporting more people.

Let’s break it down so you can see the good you’d be a part of:

With my share, 3 queer, trans, racialized artists, including myself who have done an enormous amount of community work in the last 20 years, often unpaid, we can now relax more, because we don’t have to stress about covering our livelihood expenses for the rest of the year.

A young trans Black person gets funding to explore their awakening ancestor healing journey and work with their dream mentors and teachers.

2 local Afro-Indigenous land stewardship projects get some funding to support their vision and development.

With your share, let’s say you put aside money to support the livelihood expenses of 3 revolutionary content creators who have been providing essential education on social media for free for years, including yourelf.

Plus three kids and a single mama get lunch covered for the next 3 months.

Plus three different collectives raising money to directly support folks from Congo, Sudan and P/alestine get a chunk, and an organizer gets the support they need to focus on this work of organzing that distribution of money full time for the next few weeks.

That’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 people or collectives who get a village grant from one three way split. And inside those 14 grants, the people positively impacted is gonna be even more.

We did that in 10 days. And the only reason we did it, is because we wanted to.

At the end of each workshop, we host a Town Hall Q&A for everyone who invested something. We’ll share the best things we learned by going through this process – failures and successes. We’ll share all the amazing things we funded.

Finally, we’ll offer tips, tools and strategies to take our village granting funding model and apply it to your own situation.

In other words, you’re not just an investor in village public funding, you are investing in what would otherwise be a free training; you’re learning, you’re studying, you’re getting activated and inspired, you’re solving your own problems, you’re figuring out how to give back more efficiently and at a greater scale.

Bottom Line: the most important part of this practise is not necessarily the amount we raise – although that will be life saving – it’s that we prepared and offered something we can all work with. We’re practising essential skills that can grow over time.

As we continue to grow this practise, we will see successes and failures when it comes to how much we raise, and what happens during the workshop. That is inevitable, not to be feared, but again – regarding these moments as invitation to return to Village Principles, learn something valuable and go deeper.

Our Associate Producer Program has so many possibilities and room to grow.

A content creator could start their own programming. For example, you could host a Money Moving Workshop every 4 months that covers your livelihood expenses as a creator, as well as 3 other people. That number can grow as more people invest. More and more people will want to invest, as more and more people get a chance to receive.

In the process, we are creating a culture that trains us as a village to financially support the otherwise free labour of content creators. Several other content creators can follow this model by your example. More people get their bases covered. More revolutionary projects get funding. We build stronger liberation movements because they are FINANCIALLY backed – not by the non profit sector; not by the whim of billionaires who sometimes send us money for weird reasons – but by us.

You might be thinking – I love this and I want in but I don’t have a social media audience. There are many ways to apply innovative fundraising models that work for different situations. An organized phone call campaign can be immensely successful.

I’m focusing on calling in Associate Producers with platforms into this vision first because it’s the easiest and most powerful way I can see right now to get this system up and running.

The Producer Program is just one door that we have open in the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK. In section seven I’ll talk about the different doors and realms I’m imagining to grow and nurture this movement, with exciting plots in the garden for everyone.

Before I get to that, let’s touch down on section five – what is possible to see in this movement as the years go on, that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see? I’ll see you in the next voice note.

Let’s zoom out into the big picture for a moment. What happens as this movement grows?

We collectively build more skills in financial literacy, financial boundaries, financial empowerment.

We build more capacity to heal, to live and support each other according to our integrity, and learn more about what healing actually means to us.

We have more public conversations about the truth of how we want to be supported in community. Instead of just fighting with each other, or calling each other out endlessly, we invite people into active practise to love each other well.

We build our capacity to build and grow wealth of all kinds, not just monetary. We build our capacity to support and be support – these are essential skills we need to transform conditions of genocide and capitalism.

We build more power to divest from institutions, corporations and ways of being that are destroying the planet.

We become much more organized to respond to environmental catastrophes, unexpected global events, and the needs of folks who are living in extreme crisis.

We alleviate a huge amount of stress off the shoulders of Healers, Creatives and Small Business Owners – now you have access to extra funding so you can stop hustling so much and run your business with integrity.

Our most Revolutionary Storytellers have their full process funded, so you never have to deplete, abandon or ignore a gift you have to share that the village sorely needs.

We learn to understand where our most joyful, vibrant place is in this moment, a movement – what’s the work you’re really here to do? How do you really want to spend your time while you’re alive?

How can the village support you to be a better partner, parent, friend?

You learn to trust yourself more. You take more responsibility for why you invest in something or someone, and why you don’t.

Artists and Healers get the support to go even deeper in their creativity, in their spiritual gifts, and come up with beautiful, incredible, innovative solutions and offerings to meet our current times.

Here’s more:

We can offer far more integrated and organized responses when communities go through unexpected environmental catastrophe.

Unfortunately, we have to expect to see more of that in the coming decades. Even if we are able to tip the scales toward healing and justice, which I believe we will, we are, our planet still has a lot to recover from, and we will see the consequences.

We have to be willing to move, and develop those collective skills of flexibility. A system like this helps us respond to this truth with strength, presence, and much needed grounded positivity…instead of overwhelming fear, avoidance, or a sarcastic cynicism about ‘the end of the world’ that doesn’t actually bring the best part of you forward in a crisis.

Second, we can create more organization around community funds: this will lessen the stress of needing to sift through a million go fund me campaigns that need support.

For example, a pool of organizers can take on this work as their full time income. Organizers can hold and maintain systems for people to tap into different bodies of public funding, including:

-trans people who need to access safety or medical support

-reproductive care and sexual health

-support for people healing from addiction

-survivors of genocide rebuilding their lives

-bail funds, supporting folks in prison, or protecting livelihood after incarceration

-disabled people navigating enormous medical bills

-creating ‘healing beds’ ie support for spiritual practitioners and healers who will need to help massive amounts of people spiritually detoxing from religious trauma and white supremacy more and more in the coming decades

My personal fund that I want to create, which is very close to my heart – is an animal elder fund, especially for queer and trans people who are caring for a beloved animal through their elder years, into transition and after-life.

It feels a little overwhelming to imagine how much we could actually do for each other, like there’s more to see than can ever be seen, there’s more to do, than can ever be done –

(I don’t know, that just came to me right now) but I want to bring us back to the point:

Remember that so many people are struggling to find adequate employment. By growing this movement, we’re creating jobs, good paid work, for all kinds of workers who will need to steward different parts of this system.

Creating public funding pools is really complex, when you think about how it would work – who’s holding it, giving, exchanging, and there are a lot of protocols you need to experiment with in order to make this a functioning system. That’s the point. This is our field of research. This is our invitation, to start in small places, and try.

Here I want to invite you if you feel called to pause and journal: what do you think is possible with a system like this? What do you see in the future that something like this can grow into? What do you think the possibilities are, why do you think it’s important? Feel free to spend some time and jot down your ideas.

Then come back for section six – we’re talking about investors.

Let’s talk about the role investors play in a Village Artist Grant system.

The first thing to acknowledge, is that you are already an investor in the creation and dissemination of artist grants.

You pay taxes. The government does what it does with a chunk of your money. Most of it goes into the military, policing, prisons and funding things that you are ghastly, deathly opposed to, and some of it goes to the arts sector.

That money is sent out to non profits and arts councils and arts institutions who then set up programs for artists to apply for funding, and they decide who gets your money.

So you don’t even know what projects your money is funding!

Your money is probably funding really shitty projects that you would never stand behind. Your money is probably funding amazing, incredible artists that would change your life in the best way possible but you have no easy way to connect with them.

In a Village Artist Grant System – we cut it out. Like, we cut out the middle man.

We become direct investors of public funding. We invest in someone because we want to, because we’re inspired to, and we get a direct return.

Cutting out the middle man brings us back to healing from the impact that hollywood has had on us.

I was in conversation with my friend Ravyn a while back and she reminded me of something that Lauryn Hill said, I’m paraphrasing, that she loves the music, and she loves the people, but it’s the music industry that’s killing her. AKA, the middle man.

We don’t have to look very far to see how much the music and entertainment industry fucks people up, and is especially predatory toward young people.

I want to be clear when I call out industries…I’m here to dismantle paradigms, not people.

In other words, there’s room here in the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK for the HUMANITY of big hollywood execs, billionaires, higher ups, to also heal from the impacts and so-called successes that these industries have delivered.

We actually need people with lots of money to give big during Money Moving Workshops, and in general, because you also have a stake in healing yourself according to your own integrity.

Because if you were actually listening to your own integrity, you would have to heal from internalized white supremacy, and everything else that comes with it.

You would have to learn a deeper, more authentic way of being a devoted earth steward during these times.

You would have to learn the meaning of a different kind of friendship and success that doesn’t involve chasing shiny toys and lies that capitalism sells us.

We do need you to re-balance your lineage too. That is also a process that needs to be protected. That is also the invitation.

On another level – I am actually genuinely, sincerely interested, invested and hopeful that folks who have made a way in these different arts and healing industries come into this system as collaborators.

Look, I might do a lot to call out the publishing industry, hollywood or arts industries, or the underlying exploitation of the coaching industry and wellness culture…but I do want to reach people in those industries who feel what I’m saying.

People who are like – yeah, I don’t like the way this works, even if I’ve found success. This isn’t right. It isn’t right, the way the publishing industry treats its writers. That system is broken – it was built that way. On a colonial foundation.

Instead, let’s come down here. Look at what we’re doing here. Your skills are valuable and necessary, in this larger mission of coming back home to the thriving village – including folks who have found success in other granting systems, or who work for arts councils, academic or non profit funding bodies. Most importantly, your humanity is protected here.

Let’s look at the every day independent artist. When you write a grant, you have no idea who is going to be on the jury, or who is evaluating your work.

Of course we know that BIPOC, queer, trans artists, we’ve always had an uphill climb with these funders, there’s still so much racism in determining what’s “good” or “bad” art. We often have to do so much education on our grant applications to just be somewhat equally considered, and we don’t ever get paid for that extra labour.

Often we get advice to just “talk to your peers” when you’re pitching your project on a grant. But how I would pitch my project to a room full of white academics is really different than how I would pitch to a jury full of queer, trans, racialized community storytellers.

I don’t KNOW who I’m pitching to, and I actually deserve to know that.

What we learn to do when we’re running a business: you focus on talking to the audience that you want to build with. You learn how to “market” your work according to how your voice shines and sings – thus you attract people who really want to listen to you, and who you really want to grow with.

We bring in these skills, when determining how we want to pitch a village artist grant, who it’s really for, who is going to receive the most out of this.

One last thing in this section I want to say about the concept of “free community programming.”

For my whole life I’ve been involved with providing some sort of free community programming.

Whether it was organizing after school drama club for kids in my neighbourhood when I was 13, or a lot of student organizing when I got to University.

Since 2010 I’ve been providing ongoing community arts programming in my city for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour, disabled folks, survivors. One of my first dream jobs out of University was getting paid to do radical arts history and storytelling workshops for queer youth of colour in the basement of a philipino arts collective.

Getting that funding was part of a moment where people had worked really, really, really hard to get the grant at a time when it was a much bigger uphill climb. And even though, the amount I got paid, was not at all equal to what I was actually giving, or what I needed to sustain myself, it was still the best that we could expect. It was still a huge win.

There’s one program that ran from 2011 to 2021 called Right to Dance. Two of my current best friends were a core part of creating and running that programming. Ravyn, who I already mentioned, and my friend Sze-Yang. We are chosen family today because of that program, and everything that came out of it. We didn’t know each other before this existed. We met because they offered their first program and I signed up.

This was a dance, theatre, storytelling performance program where queer people who have been pushed out of mainstream dance spaces could learn dance techniques from a queer and trans positive framework, from a disability justice framework.

This program changed my life in 2012 when I was part of their first cohort, when I realized that I could be myself on stage. I suddenly had a home to build an art practise that actually affirms my identity.

Throughout the years, I became more involved in producing burlesque and drag shows, creating theatre programming, collaborating, sharing mutual mentorship with friends and peers, all stemming from this seed of Right to Dance. Thousands of people in this city went through this programming and it changed so many people’s lives. I feel emotional thinking about it, and how much love I have for this movement and everyone who was a part of it. Everyone who never thought they could be a dancer, and now they can say they are.

These stages became a really deep place of ancestral healing and ancestral awakening for me. I wouldn’t have been activated into my ancestor healing journey if not for this space, and these friends.

But I want to say something about free public programming, because we pitched it like this. This is free, accessible dance training. This is free mentorship.

Programs like this, that are “publicly” funded by artist grants, they’re not free.

I’m not speaking for anyone else’s experience, but I can say from doing this work for 20 years, these artist grants are designed to cover less than the truth of what our livelihood needs to survive, and they rarely match the amount of hours that we put into sustaining the work.

And we were as successful in getting all the grants available to us, as we could have been. Not to mention there are millions of people out there who don’t get the grant, even when they deserve it.

My point is, the free programming we provided was never free, because we paid the cost. We covered the balance.

Free Programming is not free unless your Village is Willing to hold your bottom line.

I poured myself into community work, as did many others. I wasn’t just hosting arts programming and mentorship. In 2013 I also officially opened my astrology business. I began by inviting people into my home, to hang out on my couch with my cats and drink tea while I read their birth chart. Then my business blew up a little bit when I started doing astrology readings on youtube, and my client roster became international. (By the way, I’m sorry, I took all those astrology videos down, so you can’t see them anymore. It’s just too much of the old me.)

I wasn’t a fluffy astrologer, you may have noticed my scorpio rising nature – I supported people through trauma and deep parts of their journey that they often did not have any other space to talk about. I inspired people to follow their spiritual gifts and their healing path when that choice wasn’t as popular as it is right now.

My point is, millions of people have been changed because of what I personally offered. Most of those millions don’t have any idea who I am. What I did, what we did, created a ripple effect. The positive changes I made, they spread and grew beyond what I can actually comprehend.

In the days of the thriving village, that reciprocity should come back to you. After 20 years of service in a community, a balanced amount of support should return to you.

But even after offering everything I did for and with the community, I do not have a community that will pour back into me when I need to rest. When I’m sick. When I’m ushering a loved one through the death portal. When I’m starting something new. When I need to invest in myself.

I have a community who will buy things from me when I have something to sell – and honestly, the success of that always ebbs and flows when you’re a business owner. I have people who will sign up for free programming. I maybe, could get a little bit of gofundme money if I begged hard enough, and shared private details of my most personal struggles, most of which are nobody’s business.

But, there isn’t anything in place here to hold me for all that I have held. To give back to me, for all that I have given.

I know I’m not the only one in this position.

The community isn’t there for me for what I need, and not because people don’t want to be there. Let’s say, sure, some people don’t want to be there for me personally, for various reasons and that’s fine.

But I do believe in the year of our goddess 2025, there are enough of us who DO need and want to be there for each other for these reasons, we just need a way.

We don’t have an established Village System to exchange money, not because we can’t, and not because the money isn’t there.

The money is here, it just needs to be organized. It needs to be activated, inspired, and cared for like a garden.

For so long, there was no way to get back the balance of what we gave into community, but now there is.

We can all be investors, in our own way, from our personal field of generosity. This is our chance to correct things. You get to be part of putting your hands on the power of public funding, and bring that power back to where it belongs.

Come back for the next voice note. I’m going to take you through a tour of my garden.

Okay, remember when I said I was looking for the first few folks to work with as Associate Producers to organize Money Moving Workshops with? Well, something happened while I was recording these voice notes. Our very first Money Moving Workshop fell into place. Surprise! Surprise for you and surprise for me. I actually had already recorded all the voice notes when this happened, so I’m editing and re-recording a little bit before I drop the bundle.

Here’s what is going to happen. On Sunday November 30 2025, I’ll be hosting our first Investor Appreciation event. This will be an online gathering called, TRANS-ALIVE-LIHOOD: a trans remembrance safe passage ceremony and a money moving workshop for artists, healers, activists and good listeners. The event centers around loving up on our trans kin, and it’s open to all friends and allies.

I’m not going to share full details of what’s going to happen on the event just yet – please subscribe to my platforms to stay in the know and updated. I will say we’re going to make it very special, and I will be doing some live animal communication readings for folks during the event. Ticket sales will essentially be our collective fundraiser where we create our first chunk of village raised artist grants.

It’s really quite simple in that, you buy a ticket to the event like you normally would, but instead of a set price, you contribute a dollar amount from your field of generosity.

It’s September right now. Until November 30, I’ll be sharing this introductory bundle as widely as I can, and inviting people into visioning this new model. That’s really where the work takes place, to activate and inspire a wide range of people to give something generous, and make this way of exchanging a reality.

I’m going to work really hard on this promo period. My hope, my goal, and my trust is that we will find enough people who are willing, and the numbers will add up to my baseline goal of a 300,000 of a village artist grant. Yep, the number we’ve been talking about.

If we reach the baseline of the 300,000K, I’ll keep 100K. A very special Associate Producer will get 100K and 100K will go toward really important causes that mean a lot to us and landback promises.

If I reach my baseline of 100K, I will put 60K toward myself, my livelihood, and my ability to continue this work, and 40K will be split into village artist grants for people like you.

Out of that 40K what I’m thinking of doing is taking 30K and splitting that into 5000 or 10,000 grants, so 3-5 people will get that dollar amount. Then I’ll split the last 10K into 20 micro grants of $500.

These are my initial ideas, but I’ll decide for sure how to split that 40K once the money comes in. If I exceed my goal, I’ll keep that same 60/40 split. That split of 40% is basically my place to play, and see where and how I can curate artist grants for folks in a way that will make a good difference in their lives.

Plus, we’ll be splitting the rest of the 200,000 into even more incredible pieces of the pie.

So, how do you get in on the action? How do you become one of the people to get a 3, 4 or 5 figure village grant?

To receive something from my pot, you have to go through an Entry Portal. The Entry Portal takes you into my garden, aka the SPIDERWOMAN Network.

Like I said earlier, the Village Artist Grant System is meant to spread and be shared across wide networks, like taking a dandelion and blowing its seeds through the world. But the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK is where I invite you to grow food with me, tend to the soil together, then sit around the table to enjoy the harvest and fruits of our labour.

In this section seven, I’ll take you through a tour of my garden. I’ll tell you about the plots of land I’m incubating and the seeds I’m growing. As I show you around, I want you to think about what parts of our garden interests and excite you the most, in terms of artist residencies, study grants, services and core programming.

This core programming is where, how and why you would receive a grant from my pot.

After you go through the Entry Portal, you’ll have access to a Letter of Interest form that you can fill out.

The form will give me the chance to know who you are, what programming piques your interest, and you’ll have the chance to tell me – yes I want to be considered for a village artist grant, either from this money moving workshop, or in the future.

This is a timeless medicine bundle, so if you’re listening sometime in the future after November 30, check for any updated links, and browse my website and platforms to see what the heck happened, and what I’m doing now.

When I take you through the garden party tour, I’ll tell you about several ideas I have about what I could do with my funding now and over time. Of course, I’m not going to do everything at once.

Your Letter of Interest will also help me understand where there is already interest right now, where there is energy and enthusiasm. That’ll help me decide what I want to curate now and in the near future.

For example, if a lot of writers indicate interest in an artist residency with me, then I would prioritize what kind of programming I could create around that, and put Village funding toward grants for writers.

In section eight, I’ll give more details on how the Entry Portal works. For now, sit back, relax and feel what’s lighting up for you as I take you through a tour of my garden: The SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK.

Let’s start here: the core seed I’m growing, from which everything else unfolds. I title this – unlocking ancestor dreaming.

[sounds of water]

What I offer revolves around the public library I’ve been building for the last few years, that I call Magical Reality TV for the Revolution. This has been mostly shared as a podcast drama on my podcast, Otherworldly Giants: The Divination Channel.

This is essentially my Live Multiverse Memoir in development.

The “live multiverse memoir” is a particular kind of genre or niche of storytelling. It’s a combination of personal storytelling, fictionalized moments, ancestor communication, ancestral edu-tainment, oracle visioning and future prophecy work.

There are precise and powerful healing technologies that go into this storytelling.

My storytelling travels to wild places in the multiverse, and also very small intimate places. At the same time I’m doing energy healing work on myself – I’m repairing my child self body, my ancestral body, my planetary body.

As a narrator I dance between storyteller and teacher. I go into the stories, and then come back out of them to observe the storytelling technology, aka illuminate what kind of medicine is emerging – essential village teachings, relationship lessons, insights on the ancestor healing journey, planetary directives.

The adventure of cosmic travel is the heart of these stories, but the point is to help us be present in the here and now.

The first thing I would do with Village Funding is Fortify My Base. I would put funding toward my livelihood as I develop this public library, as well put aside full time income for a part time assistant.

Right now my library is all over the place. A lot of it on the podcast, some of it on youtube. My social media is a mess. How I share and promote this work is not at all organized. I very sporadically send emails to my newsletter or post on social media.

The biggest reason for this is that I need the help of an assistant to help me stay organized, to keep to a routine, and create content to draw people into this world. I just need more support that I haven’t thus far been able to afford.

Why full time income for part time work? This is where I take us back to Village Principles. I want to create a scholarship for this assistant position called, the Promising Student Award.

First of all, I recognize that I am a heavy duty healer. My storytelling is often light-hearted, but I go to some really deep places in my ancestor healing journey. Anyone who works really closely with me will feel that, and probably be a heavy duty healer themselves.

We might spend a few hours a week working together, but I want that person to have time and space to rest, integrate, receive downloads, and process their healing journey. It helps me relax more knowing that when we work together, you’re not also burnt out hustling on 3 other jobs trying to make ends meet.

I have someone in mind for this position who I’ve been in conversation with for a few years about this. They are, maybe a decade younger than me. They’re part of a wave of folks awakening into their ancestor/spiritual healing journey with a great amount of power. They are enormously talented, incredibly gifted, and very important to the planet and collective liberation.

I think about my last decade, and how much money I invested as I awakened into my ancestor healing journey, while also endlessly worrying about how to make money on this life path. I think about this culture we have of millions of students pouring millions of dollars into academia, only to graduate with mountainous debt they carry around for decades.

In the days of the thriving village, the village gathered around its promising students – and we made sure that they were provided for as they followed their dreams.

Through this village funding system, I can turn to my community and say – when you contribute to a money moving workshop, you’re not just supporting the livelihood of individuals, you are growing this seed, because you have a stake in it too. You also believe we deserve a culture where we RESOURCE learning journeys, no matter your age, instead of DEPLETE them or leave them to drown in debt.

By working with this assistant, I will have the support I need to create better online content to invite people into the heart of what I do. I want to harness my platforms into a space where folks can come in to study and unlock their ancestor dreams.

My platform can be a space where I say, let’s study our dreams together – sleep dreams, day dreams, oracle visioning, the dreams we have for our lives and our planet. I’d also love to work with a social media coach to help me harness my gifts into more short form content and opportunities to have fun with my audience.

Investors in a Village Grant system would then be directly paying into public funding for my public library and classroom, that they would get to engage with, learn from and enjoy.

That brings me to my next plot of land – the Enthusiasm Generator Program.

[sounds of water]

Let’s acknowledge for a minute that a lot of people have been going through really hard financial times. A lot of people haven’t been able to find adequate employment. A lot of people have had to close their small businesses, or they’re struggling to keep their doors open because what used to work just doesn’t work anymore.

Our social/political realities are of course a huge cause of this. However, I want to point us to a major opportunity that emerges through this struggle.

A lot of people who can’t find work, are people who work really, really, really hard on their personal healing journey.

These are people who invest in themselves, regardless of their resources. People who experience great joy and fulfillment when learning about their spiritual gifts, different metaphysical technologies or healing modalities, people who love devoting to their artistic craft, people who love stories. People who love analyzing stories and talking about what they learn about themselves after reading an amazing book or watching a life changing TV show or film.

The Enthusiasm Generator program is for people on a healing journey who want to create and study stories for a living. With so many budget cuts and job losses, our opportunity here is to create a whole new economy for people who already do the hard work of healing, learning and loving up on stories.

I would like to create study grants for people who love my storytelling and want to study my Live Multiverse Memoir aka the ancestor healing and village teachings that emerge from magical reality tv.

This could look like – when I drop a new podcast episode, or a new medicine bundle, I have a team of folks designated to enthusiastically binge the content and then go on a creative journey, healing journey or learning journey with what I offered, and then share what they’re learning with their friends, social networks, audience, community group or platform.

I want to recognize that the “hype man” is a sacred role in the village. When your sheer love and enthusiasm for something activates and inspires others to love it too – why shouldn’t we get paid for that joyful labour?

I’ve been this person many times. Back in 2003 I was obsessed with live journal – don’t look for my old livejournal by the way, I put it behind locked doors – for those who don’t know, live journal was/is an online blogging platform. I used to write in mine every day, not because I was trying to stay accountable to an audience, but because I was legitimately obsessed. I wrote in it because I wanted to – my posts were thoughtful, silly, deep (yes I was deep as a 19 year old, does that surprise you), often my posts were very, very moody (see above re: 19 year old scorpio rising) often sprinkled with weird inside jokes and full of bad and good poetry. For a little while I wrote all the time while not many people read it, and then I started telling my friends how fun it was. Suddenly a year later every single one of my friends and their friends also had a live journal, because the enthusiasm spread. I used to joke all the time, if only I could make a living from converting people to livejournal, I’d be a millionaire.

There are many times throughout my healing journey that I found a healer or a business I absolutely loved, and I would tell people about how much I was learning from working with x person or y person. Some of their businesses really boomed, and the enthusiastic power behind my chatty gemini stellium was a big force behind that boom.

I want to send love and reciprocity to these past versions of myself, and create space in my network to resource this sacred village role.

An Enthusiasm Generator pilot program could look like I bring 3 people onto my team as Enthusiasm Generators and you get a 10K study grant every quarter to study my work and share what you learn with your people. This could mean hosting dinners, leaving long voice notes for your friends, sharing on your email list or social media.

In another paradigm, this is the type of program that I would easily be able to charge you money for. Like, I could create a structure for my public library into a course or healing journey you’d have to pay for – and I still might do that sometimes.

But with a Village Granting System, I can also put money toward a principle I really believe in – that we do deserve to get paid for the labour we put into healing and learning, instead of just solely investing money.

After a pilot program is established, I would be able to tack on a commission model. Like, Enthusiasm Generators would get a study grant as well as opportunity to earn a commission on anybody who joins the SpiderWoman Network because of their referral.

This program has easy potential to snowball and create a lot of wealth – not just because of the commission structure, but because this is the wealth of MY medicine. I have an endless amount of stories for this live multiverse memoir coming out of my pores all the live long day, it’s like what Anya said from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: finesse!? I got finesse coming out of my bottom!

As this seed grows, I can see many people earning a full time income just by listening to stories they love and sharing what they learn.

If you love the idea of becoming an Enthusiasm Generator, you can indicate that on our letter of interest form. I will prioritize folks for this position who feel genuinely moved and inspired by my storytelling, and who have a group of people in their networks they want to share their learning journey with.

That takes me to the next part of the garden, you might say the heart of the garden – The Ancestor’s Cinematic Universe.

[sounds of water]

This space is for devoted healers & storytellers creating their own multiverse memoirs & multidisciplinary projects.

First, when I say “memoir” I mean personal storytelling in any genre. Could be in book form, but also can be theatre, dance, visual art, music, anything at all.

Creators of this form are already dedicated on their ancestor healing journey, already in process of developing their spiritual gifts and their unique methodologies.

In other words, creating your memoir projects is an ancestral memory project – it’s about re-membering and channeling ways your ancestors used to create, make art, heal, and give back.

As I’ve built my own practise, I’ve noticed there are common themes that emerge among those of us who are called to create our own “evolving” multiverse book projects.

You may get an idea or surge of creativity to write a book, but quickly realize that your inspiration keeps unfolding into multiple realms of existence.

A children’s picture book,

also births a graphic novel for young adults with a B-side to the original story…

which then unfolds into a sound healing album as a soundtrack,

that also comes with a set of ancestral teachings & spiritual, celestial research

from your lineage…

…which can be then shared via various entrepreneurial activities including hosting classes, retreats, programs, or 1:1 mentorship…

which becomes an extra income stream,

as well as a component of your marketing & promo,

as well as much needed space to process and integrate

everything emerging from your storytelling….

which then may flow into a BTS documentary

or an artist roundtable series

or a living room concert tour

…that is also an earth-star mapping project,

and collective ancestor altar.

The reality is, many people start creating like this when they hit a certain part of their ancestor healing journey. It’s how your medicine begins to flow when you bring village-centered Ancestors forward.

Some healers and storytellers are feeling incredibly overwhelmed right now, because they have so many ideas, downloads, creative fire spilling out of them – they have no idea where to put everything, and they have no idea how on earth they could possibly get the funding the need to truly support the enormity of what they’re holding.

It is essential that those of us who create this way, and more people who will find themselves creating this way as time goes on, have places that directly understand and support the process.

The reality is, a lot of well meaning publishers, studios, programs or coaches do not understand this process when they see it, or how to properly support the flow of this kind of medicine.

I will caution against advice to try and fit everything you’re holding into one money making offer, or even multiple offers, or into a creative process that doesn’t prioritize ancestor healing.

Let me be clear, learning how to create paid offers out of parts of your medicine is a valuable, much needed skill to develop, and I appreciate the many good folks who are supporting people to do this – but I’m inviting us to look at more of the ground here, that needs a different kind of full bodied financial support.

To truly support the entirety of your process and livelihood when you’re a heavy hitter creator – to give you more spaciousness and grounding, instead of squeezing everything you’re doing in a tighter funnel where not everything can breathe properly – you do need a village artist granting system, or something else like it, to hold you as you follow your creative process and healing journey with integrity.

Let’s look at the bigger picture, what’s really happening here: As each of us create and share our multi-layered, multidisciplinary stories, combined with beautiful pockets and containers of research development, healing practitioner work, teaching and guiding others through your unique methodology, hosting life changing events and experiences with your audience, prioritizing a life of living closely with the land, coming home to rest retreats and grief retreats, writing and reading retreats with really good people…

…what we’re doing is creating our own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe aka the Ancestors Cinematic Universe (hear me out)

You know the Marvel movies, and Marvel comics right…stories about all these different superheros across the Multiverse – some people get solo movies, then sometimes they come together with big cross-overs…

That’s what we’re doing here, in real life. We’re creating our own version of intersecting storylines, spin off series, cross overs, overlapping projects, intersecting research.

The village principle underneath all of this, is what I call – Ancestral Organizing for Liberation.

Through doing this work alongside each other, we recognize how connected our personal healing journeys are, even when you feel like following your gut and spirit is leading you into some wild, weird, unexplainable places.

Here in the ACU, we look at the ways we are collectively creating amazing tapestry together. When we put our wild, weird, unexplainable guidance on the same mural, and weave it into the same quilt – what does that treasure map take us? How do our personal healing journeys need one another, and feed one another? We realize we are each other’s puzzle pieces.

What I hope to offer here is 2-fold:

1 – A “Dream Team Peer Support Circle” ie hosting a regular space for those of us who create this way to come together, compare notes and portals. This is an ancestor-guided space to talk about our wins, share our challenges, mutual support and skill building. This is ideal for people who have an established ancestor healing practise or work closely with a spiritual tradition, and you resonate with what it means to be a multiverse memoir creator.

Note, you don’t HAVE to have many projects going on at once. Part of what it means to be this of creator is that we go through seasons – sometimes we’re focused on one thing, sometimes many. The point of a peer support circle would be to offer you support according to the integrity of your journey.

A peer support circle can turn into many beautiful things like, gathering for artist retreats or inspired collaboration in different cities or parts of the land. Village Grant Funding can be put toward funding artist retreats, different people’s travel, hosting gathering places, or into creating what I call “Heavy Hitter” Artist Grants. My goal would be to offer 5 figure artist grants toward creators in the Dream Team Circle.

2 – I’m officially introducing my new service as the Ancestors Literary Agent: this is the closest, most personalized way I can work with someone. It involves full scale developmental support for your projects and funding to ensure your livelihood and dreams always have what they need. I’m basically Jerry McGuire in your corner, but you know…with a different personality…

Anyway, my goal for folks in my roster is to get you 5 or 6 figure grants through our village system, aka you’re my priority as I raise this money, and I also help you monetize your gifts in other ways too. I’m keeping my roster very small as I launch this new service; I already have one person in my roster – yay, me, Jerry McGuire – and that might be enough for me to begin with. But I may open 1 or 2 more spots in 2026. We’ll see where the interest is.

The people well suited for this spot are folks who feel incredibly heart connected to my voice and vision, and you resonate deeply with what I described about the multiverse memoir creator. If this is you, please indicate your interest on our form for either the dream team peer support circle or my literary agent services, or both.

Hop on over to the next voice note and I’ll show you the next part of the garden.

Let’s look over here. I want to tell you about the possibilities for different kinds of artist residencies I could run.

[sounds of water]

An artist residency is great for people who want to learn with me, but you may or may not resonate with being a multiverse memoir creator.

The first stream of artist residency is for students and practitioners of ancestor theatre, or celestial theatre. The second is for spiritual development and creative craft development.

Ancestor Theatre and/or Celestial Theatre is essentially a form of creating work for theatre, film, TV, books, multimedia, or performance art that collaborates with Ancestors and the Spirit World in its foundation. What you’re doing is creating stages as altars, for ancestors to move, heal and evolve. Stages can be a screen, they can be outdoors, they can be pages in a book.

This is truly one of my deepest places of joy and expertise.

Celestial Theatre is essentially a combination of theatre and astrology that I have practised for a long time.

The “Gift and Craft Development” stream is for folks who may or not be not be working on a specific project, but you want support to develop your spiritual and creative gifts, technologies, methodologies and craft.

A pilot program could look like, I make space for 3-5 people in 2026 to work with across these streams. So if you’re writing a script, directing a film, building a methodology, if you’re going deeper into your gifts or craft, and you want me on your team to help you through your process no matter what stage you’re at.

For these people, we would create a personalized curriculum for you, including spending time in the Otherworldly Giants Creative and Spiritual Luxury Spa. We could also look for places I could come directly onto your project and assist you where you need.

What is a Creative and Spiritual Luxury Spa you ask?? Well. This is a space I’ve created to house my most powerful gifts and mentorship – including my practise with quantum astrology, animal communication, numerology, spiritual diagnosis, clairvoyant tarot, and more.

Spending time in my spa means we sit together 1:1 for a personalized reading or mentorship session. You can choose a luxury spa service from my menu. I’ll include a link to the menu so you can check it out.

I imagine putting some village funding aside to support my livelihood while I offer this mentorship, and the people I work with could also receive a study grant to work together. For example, I could offer someone a $5000 grant and you receive my mentorship 4 times a year.

Let me pause for a minute and talk about what would happen if at the end of this campaign I come to the conclusion that the village is not in fact willing to exchange money in this way. What if I try to gather money toward this cause and it doesn’t work? Because, there’s no guarantee that it will.

This is where I would change my mentorship model into a high ticket consultation business. I would then charge people 4 figures to work with me in this capacity or book sessions in my luxury spa. I would have to keep my prices high in order to keep my lights on. And I can back up my prices.

That is honestly, what a lot of people have advised me to do over the years.

Let me tell you a little story about my journey with my first therapist. I lucked out with my first therapist who happened to be an incredible person to work with. I saw her pretty regularly between 2009 to 2016. I learned so much from our time together, and the work we did made it possible for me to go deeper in my ancestor healing journey.

We ended on good terms, and on our last day she told me how much my presence had changed her practise. That me just showing up, me being my messy ass self with all my anxious attachment issues…what I had brought forward in my commitment to heal. To be who I am. To share how I think and my unique perspective…she told me that I had challenged her to become a better person, on many occasions, and that I had challenged her practise to go deeper. She affirmed that my presence was felt across her entire practise.

Remember my friend Ravyn, who has been a constant good friend over the last 15 years. We’ve both seen each other through so much. I was telling this story about my therapist to Ravyn recently and she said – yeah and Shaunga, what I did in that therapy room then gave back so much to the community.

In terms of everything I created and held: the queer performance showcases I organized, the healing work I did with other people.

What I did in the therapy room was felt across the entire village.

My point here is to recognize, in the thriving village – we support both the healer and the person who seeks to heal. We consider both these positions essential labour that requires reciprocity.

For 7 years I put a lot of money into that one therapist. When we closed our relationship, while there was an acknowledgment of how much I had given to her practise, she didn’t give me any of my money back as a return, now did she? She couldn’t if she wanted to – that’s against the rules of whatever therapist or social work guild she’s a part of.

Neither did my village give me anything, because there is no system for the village to pour back into us when we complete major phases in our healing journey.

The principle of this Village Artist Grant system advocates for both parties – we do not put the entire financial burden of healing work onto the client. Pause to let that land.

Nor do we ask the healer to absorb the financial burden of lowering their prices to the point of depletion in order to accommodate their clients.

And honestly, in our current therapy models, both things are happening. Clients feel financially burdened even as therapists try and keep their prices low, and therapists and healers are still feeling overworked and financially depleted.

This Village System is my way of changing that, correcting that, re-balancing that.

(why didn’t my therapist give me my money back!? I did good work! I completed the mission! No, this part has me dead – what would happen if she went to her social work guild and was all like, can I…can I just pay this witch please…she, she needs some money, after everything she’s been through in therapy, can I just give her some cash…and they’ll be like no. No you may not.)

Alright, let me take you over here and tell you about my OPEN/CLOSED Classroom and OPEN/CLOSED Rehearsal Room.

[sounds of water]

These are part of my public or semi public offerings that I would offer on youtube, closed zoom rooms, or special local events.

These are for folks who want to learn with me, but maybe you don’t want to go through an entire residency, maybe you just want a really amazing quantum astrology reading. Or an animal communication reading. Or you want to learn more about the principles and techniques of ancestor theatre or celestial theatre.

This is where I can create a lot of fun things to share on youtube, meaningful events we can organize online for bigger audiences, or even places I can travel to, to host amazing in person events.

For example, I can host Animal Communication circles. These are incredibly powerful. They can accommodate large or small groups of people. In my animal communication practise, I work with the animal kingdom in general, and I can also channel messages from your personal animal companion in body or in spirit.

In an Animal Communication Circle, I would usually begin by channeling a message from the Animal Kingdom to help us move through the times we are in. Then I would open the floor to do personal readings for folks who want me to communicate with their animal.

Similar things can be done with any of the technologies I work with, including quantum astrology, numerology, and more.

Readings can also be done for folks on my youtube channel. With enough Village Funding, I could offer some kind of honourarium, like $500 for folks to come on the channel and receive a reading in public, because that’s vulnerable. If you’re interested in getting a reading like this, you can indicate interest for the open/closed classroom.

Now, let me tell you about the After School Ancestors Drama Club

[sounds of water]

I love this one so much – this is the open or closed rehearsal room. This is where I invite guests to do script readings with me. This can be done on youtube, closed zoom rooms, or local in person events. Think of it as a crash course on skills and techniques in Ancestor or Celestial Theatre.

Say on youtube, I bring in a script that I wrote. Or, we take a script from a beloved TV show. I invite a couple actors, along with a dramaturg and some witnesses. You don’t have to be a professional actor, you can just want to play.

This would be a live demo on how I direct my rehearsal rooms, how I support the actors to find their characters, and how a team works to support the process. PLUS I take you through how you unpack and pull out the ancestral and celestial medicine embedded in the script. Which ultimately teaches us something important about the current moment in time.

I have a dream of partnering with parents or caregivers who are raising or homeschooling teens – ie weirdo, genderfabulous, spiritually gifted teens who are excited to learn theatre from the ancestors point of view.

I think about who I was as a spiritually gifted teen, in a context where nobody knew what was going on with me, that was or how to support me, and how much my life would have changed if I had appropriate eldership and guidance that I could trust.

I also think about how many parents and caregivers are turning to homeschooling as our mainstream education systems get more and more toxic and unbearable.

I would love to give artist grants to parents. I think we’ve talked about the injustice of their unpaid labour for too long – let’s put money on it now.

I would love to find where the possibilities are for me to come in and run these kinds of rehearsal rooms for teens. My only request is that I want to work with the weirdos. This is so I can pay some respects to my weirdo teen self, or teen wolf, as it were.

If this is you, please indicate your interest via the entry portal.

Next, let me tell you about the Farmer’s Market Innovation Committee Social Club

[sounds of water]

I just love the name, and how it’s really long. We could also call this the Party Planning Committee aka the PPC or the Committee to Plan Parties. You let me know which one you prefer.

My idea here is to put together a team of folks who want to invest in researching and practising innovative ideas as to how to run our businesses so we don’t have to rely so much on social media for marketing. Yes, even if you run an online business or a partial online business.

I’m not going to pitch why this is important, I think we already know. I have lots of ideas of what we could do – including set up a regular farmer’s markets, that can be local or also online, that can be run alongside money making workshops, so we have regular places to promote our work without having to rely on apps or hustle so hard on our email lists.

These can be spaces to introduce ourselves and share our current services. Or people can say, I’m looking for this kind of thing, who’s doing that?

I’m also thinking of the possibility of creating some kind of phone book, or like the ancestor’s linkedin, an organized way of finding each other.

I know a lot of people are already thinking and working on this issue – my point is to say, we can also fund the process of innovation through this village system. IE we can create some kind of stipend or salary for folks who are well suited to take on this research and organizing.

This kind of organizing can extend to creating more opportunities to socialize and have fun together – game nights, trivia, hang outs, social mixers….maybe even maaatch making….? I will definitely support that initiative, and observe, and definitely not participate in such a thing as a match making event, she said on September 12 2025 at 4:22pm!

(I just yelled like that because I originally wrote that down at 4:22pm, and now when I’m recording it, also at 4:22pm. And 4:22 is very important number for me in terms of numerology. We’ll talk about that another time. But I’m like, what is the Universe trying to tell me!?)

**did you also notice that this voice note came out as 14:22 in length!? WHAT!?!?! you can’t make this %*$! up!

If you’re interested in joining such a committee or you want to see something like this happen, please indicate farmer’s market innovation committee on your letter of interest form.

Alright Good Listeners, let’s move on to the next voice note. Part three of this section, to wrap up our garden party tour.

I want to give you an example of what all of this could like with a project that I’ve been dreaming and incubating for years. It’s called “What Buffy Taught Me About Love.”

[sounds of water]

I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as a text, is an incredible resource for us to study with insights and guidance for our current times – and I’m not just saying that because I own all the box set dvds and I was obsessed with this show ever since I watched the first episode on YTV in 1997. (That’s right, YTV, I was in so-called Canada!)

There’s so much we can learn from this text about the Ancestor healing journey, especially if you look at the lineage of slayers, Willow’s relationship with magic, plus the really deep things it has to say about grief, friendship, fighting against your inner demons, community, power, your personal gifts and strengths.

Plus Buffy definitely wins at like promoting every single type of racism that you could think of. But as someone who loves this text, I actually feel like we can learn so much from its problems, and what it does horribly wrong, as much as we can learn from all the things it does beautifully.

In my Ancestor communication journey I’ve been building a practise and technology I call working with Fictional Characters as our Ancestors and Accomplices.

This is about going on a creative journey with fictional characters we love, as sovereign spirits. Here, the character and their journey collaborates with you and your healing journey. Together you learn something really important to offer on the collective altar of our current moment.

You can see many examples of how I do this with characters from Buffy and also other characters and stories I love on my podcast aka public library. I did this with Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy. I even did this with the acclaimed, widely regarded seminal film, Mighty Ducks 2.

I had to look up the definition and characteristics of a seminal film, what makes a film seminal – innovation, influence, cultural impact and technological advancement. Yup, that’s Mighty Ducks 2.

So, what I want to do eventually is publish an anthology called “What Buffy Taught Me About Love.” I want to bring together a group of Storytellers who also love Buffy, and who are also on an Ancestor healing journey. I want the anthology to offer perspectives of disability justice, Black feminism, racial healing, cross-cultural solidarity work, economic justice and Indigenous sovereignty – as well as conversations on grief, friendship, magic, leadership, all the things that Buffy inspires.

This would be an Artist Residency along with opportunity to publish your work in this Anthology. During the Artist Residency, I would lead and support the group through a process of journeying with a fictional character as your Ancestor – we would focus stories on Buffy, but I’d also be open to folks journeying with other fictional characters, or maybe that’s a part two anthology.

I’d love to give each person who goes through this Residency an Artist Grant to work on their piece, plus a monetary gift for publishing. I think it’s so important to have places that prioritize deep, thoughtful, nuanced conversation on how do we move through conflict together? How do our definitions and conceptions of solidarity, privilege, loyalty, friendship change we go deeper into our healing journeys – personally and collectively?

Pulling out the medicine of beloved stories is one of the most powerful ways that we can have these conversations and offer each other essential medicine for our times. The folks in this residency would be putting together a body of research and storytelling to speak to this.

As I raise funding through this system, I’ll be putting money toward this project. Before I invite in an Artist Residency, I’d like to spend some time developing and promoting more of my work on the topic, so more people can see how this process of working with fictional characters functions when I do it.

Here, my first priority would be to bring in 1-3 Enthusiasm Generators. These are folks who would get a study grant to study my work with Buffy and other fictional characters, and share what they learn publicly. So we would be having a public conversation, and publicly developing this body of wisdom.

We’d invite folks to follow along and also study this work with us. This would create the foundation I need to open an Artist Residency – people would already be following along and developing their work ready to apply to the artist residency and anthology. The anthology itself could be multi-tiered. We could create a podcast drama, we could publish a book. We could create a traveling gallery or exhibition. Possibilities are endless.

I want to touch on a few the main bodies of wisdom that I’ve been developing through Magical Reality TV for the Revolution.

[sounds of water]

Some of it is published, and a lot of it are still drafts that I have scattered across journals and word documents that I haven’t published yet.

But I want to give you an idea of the themes I’m working with. So if you’re thinking about becoming an Enthusiasm Generator, or going through an Artist Residency with me, you can say – I really want to study and devote to THIS topic.

On the letter of interest form, there will be a place for you to indicate interest in any one of these themes or bodies of wisdom in development.

The first one I call: Re-Membering to Talk Drrty to Myself: here, I explore the intersections of spiritual healing and sexual healing, ancestor healing and erotic writing, from a survivor-centered focus, as well as possibility models of healing intimacy, friendship, interdependence, break-ups, all from a queer, kinky, poly-positive and disability justice perspective.

Next is The Revolutionary Heart: this is where I share my unique technology in animal companion medicine, including animal communication, soul and lineage healing, and how our animals help us find our greatest revolutionary contributions for our current times – in life, end of life, and after-life. An important part of this topic includes lessons I’ve learned from Animal Companion Loss for Grievers of all kinds.

Next I have, Learning to Live Without Regret – transforming legacies of trans suicide into trans alive-lihood, and Welcome Back Multiverse Historian – getting nerdy about all different types of ancestor technologies of time, verses colonial or capitalist time…and both of these topics feed into something very close to my heart, which is what it means to really, really want to live wholeheartedly, to really want to be alive right now for no other time than what we are given.

Lastly, as we circle back to the beginning, I want to return to our Village Producer Program.

[sounds of water]

I’ve spoken about the Associate Producer role at length. To recap, this role is great for someone who has a platform, audience or network you can activate. It’s also great for people who have their own thing going. You may or may not want to participate in our other programming, but you believe in this mission and you want to apply it to your own situation.

With the right partnership, I can help you generate a 5 or 6 figure village grant that you can put toward supporting your programming, giving out grants to people you work with, and help weave more people into different models of financial growth and sovereignty.

I am prioritizing collaboration with the best suited Associate Producers, as I feel this is the best entry point to get the system off the ground. If you feel you’re a good match, and you want to rock and roll, please do go through the Entry Portal and send in your letter of interest form as soon as possible.

The second role is an Executive Producer Program. This is great for someone who has an extra stash and wants to make a significant investment into the SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK and the work I do here.

This role clicked for me when I thought about how often I’ve looked into new business start up grants and loans hosted by major banks, and competitions hosted by big corporations, where the best application could win a nice chunk of money to grow your business.

Most often these programs include setting you up with some sort of business mentorship.

I think we can agree that bank loans aren’t ideal, and those competitions, I often don’t match the criteria and I don’t want all the strings attached to winning anyway. I don’t want a kind of business mentorship that will try to get me to succeed in a system I’m designed to dismantle.

Here, we’re returning to our fundamental question – what is the producer’s role in the village? How can we take back our power in places that banks and corporations have imposed on us?

If you’re a company or individual who has gathered some extra wealth, I would consider an investment of at least $5000 eligible for an Executive Producer program. This number might change as time goes on, but as I write this in September 2025, I feel good about $5000 as a base number.

You could dedicate your investment to a particular body of wisdom in development, or to the village granting system as a whole.

We would set up a personalized program for each Producer regarding an exchange of services, skills, mutual mentorship and ROI.

For example, along with the financial investment, you could offer us some kind of business support, wise council or support in an area we need to build more skills.

We also set up a way for you to learn from our research, education and advocacy in areas that matter to you.

For example, if you’re a survivor-centered organization, we could use some of your investment to fund Heavy Hitter artist grants for folks exploring ancestor-healing perspectives of trauma and survivorship – or you can put funding toward the body of work we’ve developing on “Re-Membering to Talk Drrty to Myself” (imagine pitching that to royal bank amirite??)

As this body of work grows, we could offer you some kind of quarterly or bi-yearly financial ROI. We would decide all the details on a case by case basis.

By the way, you can be both an Executive Producer and Associate Producer. Like, you could do a fundraiser or a money moving workshop with your audience and contribute an Executive Producer amount to SPIDERWOMAN.

Look at how badass this is. You’re not just benefiting from the work we do, we’re not just supporting each other, you’re not just financially backing initiatives that would NEVER get funding from other places…you’re doing all of that AND you get to do what big hollywood producers do, but we do this our way. The village way.

So next time someone stops you in an elevator and they ask: so what do you do?

You can say: Oh me? I’m an Executive Producer.

And they’ll say: Oh, you work in hollywood?

And you’ll say: Oh no, I don’t work for the industry. I work for the planet.

[sounds of water]

As I was recording this bundle, I realized there’s one hot pink elephant in the room that I do want to touch on in section seven. That is the topic of accountability and trust when exchanging money. Let’s touch down there before I tell you about the Entry Portal.

Let’s talk about the Hot Pink Elephant. That is the topic of accountability and trust, and the fact that there are a lot of scammers out there, a lot of predators out there, and probably the biggest concern and hesitation most people will find with this system – including myself – how do we make sure we can trust who we share our money with? How do we know people won’t steal or cheat or take advantage of people’s generosity?

The short answer is that we don’t. But this is our field of research and practise. To me, it’s very clear in this moment, it’s more important for us to try to try to figure this out with each other, rather than not.

Here is my personal accountability:

When I generate artist grants for myself my priority of what I do with the money will go into these 3 basic streams: 1) Fortify my Base; 2) Community Development; 3) Gift Giving and Giving Back

Fortifying my Base looks like:

-covering my livelihood + personal urgent matters
-supporting close friends and family
-clearing debts + health benefits + legal matters
-covering “free” public programming and mentorship
-salaries for core team and support staff
-business operations

Community Development looks like putting money into:

-investor appreciation events
-artist residencies
-spiderwoman programs
-special programs and projects
-which of course means more village artist grants for more people

Gift Giving and Giving Back looks like:

-creating my QT / BIPOC animal elder fund
-a survivors get free fund (two public funds I’m invested in)
-afro-indigenous landback promises
-repair + reparations
-collective urgent matters

So, when you’re considering going through the Entry Portal, think about where you can see yourself in the village funding I raise. For example, as time goes on, I’ll need more folks joining my team as my core team members and support staff. My health benefit stipend will go toward continuing my personal, spiritual and professional development.

When you send your Letter of Interest, there’s a place for you to share what you’re working on or how you’d like to contribute to the growth of this world. If you have active services, please do let me know, as I’m always looking to sign up for things that excite me, hire healers, guides and coaches, take programs, attend events, etc.

So on this topic of accountability and trust, I am always thinking about how to protect those of us who invest in this system, including myself, especially when there is so much broken trust, scammers, abuse of power, and exploitation of generosity.

I will say that this system comes from years and years of doing my personal financial shadow work, investing in my financial healing, deeply considering financial responsibility, and that’s what I center as a core belief and value in this system.

That is, the belief that prioritizing the responsibility for your personal financial healing is essential to liberation work and the health of your your relationships in general.

This is why you can see the way I’ve organized my own grant – accountability to myself, and funding myself, and the core people around me, is always my priority. When I work with producers, or anyone, I will encourage you to really think deeply about your financial needs, and challenge any conditioning where you feel like you want to skimp on yourself as a habit.

To buy into this system, I want us as a village to hold each other accountable to our personal financial wellness as a priority. This is a way of loving each other well. Instead of demanding people to give more to the collective without caring if we are dehumanizing them, or if they’re actually safe in their personal lives.

I say this because we can get really predatory and entitled toward people, especially young people, racialized people, queer and trans people – when they see you doing financially well. Thus putting yourself out there in public to receive a grant, is a very vulnerable thing to do – I think much more so than selling something, which is already vulnerable.

I’ll give you an example from reality tv. I was watching this korean pop star reality tv show, yes I was. It was at a point where they had just put together a girl band of mostly teenagers. The music producer said to them – you have to be careful, because once you get famous, your audience and your fans will love you so much. They’ll feel like they own you. And, in many ways they do.

These teenagers were supposed to just take that in, like it’s normal. That as you become more visible, your audience owns you.

I want a community around this mission who is invested in protecting each other from that, not enforcing it. When you contribute to someone’s artist village grant, you do not own the people you support or resource.

I want us to question and challenge what comes up for us when we see people receive wealth – monetary, but also love, praise and attention in public.

We can feel angry and jealous, and a lot of racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic attitudes can come up, judgements about who does and doesn’t deserve to be supported.

I want us to challenge those notions about what we think is a respectable way for someone to spend money when we give generously to them.

It’s a very common narrative in the zeitgeist that people will say – don’t give people living on the street too much of your money, they’ll just spend it on booze and drugs.

One – that’s your assumption and judgement based on stigma. Two – so what if they spend their money on drugs and booze?

If you go to a concert or house party or big sporting event, do you have a problem with the millions of people who are spending tens of thousands of dollars or more every year on drugs and booze? I don’t know, maybe you do.

But the point is, the things we think are good respectable ways to spend money are 100% shaped by your religious, cultural, socio-economic, racial, gendered upbringing.

And the first value I named at the top was that this is not a space for us to impose our religious or spiritual beliefs onto others.

For some people, it’s deplorable that you would offer money to someone in spirit of supporting their healing journey, who then spends that money on a sex worker. But how you feel about that is your religious, cultural upbringing.

For me, sex workers have always been revered, beloved members of communities and the village saw them as providing essential labour, that keeps up the health of the community as a whole, most often this was essential spiritual labour.

Point being, when you give someone your money, it’s theirs – that’s part of our commitment toward financial sovereignty, and centering the principle that we self-determine our healing journey.

Check your assumptions around what is too much money for someone to have. That struggling artists or struggling activists are somehow more trustworthy or better people. When in reality, if someone is starved for money and living below their means, there’s more pressure on them to act out of integrity out of desperation.

Let’s remember that it’s expensive to live. When you see someone receive a six figure artist grant in 10 days, understand how quickly that money spreads and runs out.

You don’t know what kind of enormous debt people are carrying. What kind of enormous medical bills or family emergencies. Some people have really big families and are sending money all over the world, helping out family members surviving environmental degradation and persecution.

Lest we forget how expensive it is to get out of an abusive relationship. We’re talking huge ongoing legal fees. Getting out of financial dependency with your abuser so that you can get your own housing, and start over in life.

Don’t assume that just because someone got a huge grant that they’re living large.

You will see me raising money multiple times for this system and every time I’m putting some toward myself. I have big things I need to pay for in my personal life. I often run big projects behind the scenes where multiple people need good payment.

When I offer study grants or artist residencies, I don’t want to give people some cute honourarium stamped on the ass and approved by the non profit industrial complex. I want to be able to offer people an amount that will make a real positive impact on their livelihood, even if for a few months.

That means I want this community to protect and encourage and celebrate my need to raise money repeatedly, instead of this – wow, Shaunga’s taking more money for herself, again, doesn’t she have enough already? That shit? We cut it out.

I want you to check your assumptions around disability, racism, anti-Blackness and laziness – like oh look at those photos on their instagram, they got a grant and now they’re just lying around, don’t give them any more money.

I’m a person of colour who lives with disability. I cannot work as much as able bodied people can. I need to move slow, rest a lot, and get paid more. Not to mention, I am always providing a huge amount of invisible labour as a Ceremonialist and Energy Healer.

Disabled people have to spend more spoons than able bodied people when it comes to the labour of navigating an illness or disability in an ableist world. Believe me, we have already spent a full workday before breakfast.

But I’ll tell you the truth from my horse’s mouth:

If there’s ever a time when I’m making more money than I need, I will give it back. To Landback. I will pay it forward. I have no desire to keep more than I need to live well. I’ve spent years putting essential parts of my health aside out of necessity, and I need to spend a good amount of time correcting that.

On a spiritual level, I actually CAN’T live out of balance with money. In my spiritual practise, I cannot receive less than I need, and I cannot take more than I need out of greed. If I did either of these things as a habit, it would seriously fuck up my life. You don’t fuck around with balance when you’re a heavy duty healer like me.

But more than that, this is what my heart wants – to rebalance my lineage. This is where my freedom is. This is where my life is.

But guess what – there’s no reason that you should believe anything I say, or trust me, unless you want to.

This is our opportunity to build those skills of deep listening, intuition, discernment, self observing, and empowerment – you decide what you do with your money. It is your birth right to learn how to trust yourself. This system gives us the opportunity to build those skills.

It’s also designed to keep scammers and predators at bay. The reason so many of us don’t trust each other, is because capitalist industries and culture is designed to encourage the growth of abuse, scammers and predators.

Not to say it could never happen, but this system is designed to hold you accountable to your healing. There is less of a need to cheat and lie out of desperation, when you’re allowed to just be honest about what you need and why. If you do keep cheating, your village will see right through you, and they won’t invest in you. People who intend to abuse will want to stay away from this system, even on an intuitive, energetic level, because they know they can’t get away with that shit here.

These are all starting points to this huge conversation, and we’re gonna keep growing it over time.

I was talking about this with Ravyn yesterday and she mentioned that to build trust, we want to create space for investors to really feel a part of what they’re growing.

So when you receive a grant, there’s an opportunity here to keep sharing your process, telling people what you learned, host places for folks to come together, hang out, see the behind the scenes of your journey, share how you’re doing.

This is what I mean when I say I want to put funds toward investor appreciation events. I’ll encourage folks and also do this myself – to build systems of staying connected with folks from a place of genuinely wanting to share, verses via obligation or fear and stress around providing deliverables.

Money Moving Workshops are designed to offer a Town Hall and appreciation event at the end of a campaign, so everyone feels complete with one process. From there you can keep following along with a creator, or part ways whenever you want.

As I grow this system, I will be always thinking of special ways to give back to investors at large.

So that’s our garden folks. Feel free to pause here if you want to journal or jot down your ideas. Are there any programs or artist grants that excite you? How do you want to participate in this system as I grow it?

Those who become the first wave to go through my Entry Portal will get first priority in terms of who and where I distribute the money I raise. This is your opportunity to share with me who you are, what matters to you, and how you want to give and receive.

Let’s go to the next voice note, I’ll give you details on how the Entry Portal works.

Alright, let’s talk about the Entry Portal. First I want to acknowledge something I know about my medicine. In that, when I speak to people, if you feel me, you really feel me. For some of you, there will be many moments of going through this bundle where I say something and you’re like – omg yessss, ugh, say it!

Think of where those moments were for you. Often my medicine will activate your medicine too. I’ll say one sentence, and it’ll send you into a portal, it’ll unlock some hidden creativity and a wealth of memories, ideas and stories will come out.

I encourage you to sit with that, and work with it. Think about any part of what I shared as an Entry Portal into your own leaning, healing or multiverse adventure. Create a space to draw that out, whether it’s a private journal, a public platform, or an email list. Or take this as your nudge to send the voice note to your text chain and tell them – this is what I listened to today. This is what came up for me today. This is what I learned from going through this bundle. These are the revelations I’m having.

This is a way for you to process and integrate after going through this journey, to share, to let yourself be seen and known, and also does me a solid because by spreading the magic of this system.

If you’re finding that happening for you naturally, that my words are activating a lot of thoughts, stories and ideas, the official Entry Portal is a really good option for you. In other words, you are likely a good match to receive an artist grant from my pot or work with me more closely.

So, here’s how it works. You make a monetary investment of $99. When you do that, you’ll get access to two different Letter of Interest forms. There’s a General Form, and an Inner Circle form.

On the General Form, I’ll ask questions like, what season of life are you in, where in life do you want more support, if you could put funding on the integrity of your healing journey, what would you spend that money on right now? I’ll also ask about what parts of this movement and vision really speak to you. You’ll have the chance to check a box for whichever parts of the garden excite you, aka our programming or opportunities to receive grants, as well as what topics or bodies of wisdom you’re interested in, and you can check as many boxes as you like.

The Inner Circle form is a chance to go deeper and receive bigger payoffs.

Remember when I said that during the first Money Moving Workshop, if I hit my baseline goal, I’ll put 40K toward village artist grants.

With that 40K, I’m imagining taking 30K and creating 5000 or 10,000 dollar grants for 3-5 people. Then I’ll take 10K and split that into 20 $500 mini grants.

Both forms have a list attached to them regarding what kind of programming or funding you are eligible for.

When you fill out the General Form, you are eligible for those 20 mini grants of $500. You are also eligible for the Producer Program, Farmer’s Market Program, Open/Closed Rehearsals or Classrooms, or Special Partnerships.

If you want the 5000 or 10,000 dollar grants, or even higher as this movement grows, then you have to fill out the Inner Circle form. This makes you eligible for the Enthusiasm Generator Program, Dream Team Peer Support Circle, Literary Agent Services, Artist Residencies, or Heavy Hitter Grants.

In the Entry Portal, when you pay the $99, you’ll get the two forms, as well access to 2 storytelling bundles from my Storyteller’s Apothecary, aka my Live Multiverse Memoir.

To fill out the Inner Circle form, you can listen to one or both of those storytelling journeys, and then share with me what they brought up for you.

Journeying with these stories is best way to assess whether you’re a great match for our closer programming, because it’s exactly what you’d be doing as an Enthusiasm Generator.

The first story journey is called: “break-ups that define you” and the second one is called: “end of life, after life, all of life.”

The first bundle falls under the body of work I’m developing on exploring possibilities of healing sex, love, intimacy, partnership and freeing ourselves from wounded relationship paradigms.

The second bundle introduces you to my animal medicine practise. Here you can see how I do animal communication readings and how I channel messages from the animal kingdom. It was originally designed to support folks who have, are currently, or will usher an animal through their end of life phase, and the grieving journey that comes with that.

But also the lessons I share in that journey are relevant to grievers of all kinds, including the grieving that comes with investing in your healing journey.

I originally dropped both of these medicine bundles in my Storyteller Apothecaries in August. At that point I didn’t know that I was going to use them for this entry portal, I just created them as their own thing. You can purchase them individually for $55 each.

But here in the Entry Portal, you get them both for a discounted $99 plus access to the Letter of Interest forms.

On the Inner Circle form, you can share with me: how do these stories touch you? How do you feel about the characters? How does my storytelling weave with what’s going on in your own life or healing journey? What are you learning about yourself, the world, and the multiverse?

When I choose the 3-5 people to receive these 5 or 10K grants, the Inner Circle form is how I get to assess who is already deeply weaving with what I put on the table, and what collaborations are ready to move forward now. To receive one of these you have to fill out both of the forms.

If you want to make yourself eligible for one of those $500 grants, you just need to fill out the general form.

Here’s what I want to do with those 20 $500 grants. From the first money moving workshop, I want to give 15 of those grants to queer or trans animal companions, in spirit of your love story with your animal – whether they are in body or in spirit. I want you to have that money, just because.

A small thing, but you can put this toward something special for your animal. Or toward your grief journey if they have passed on. Or do something that makes you happy, because that’s what our animals want, right? They want us to be happy.

This little small thing is part of how I want to start the creation of my animal elder public fund.

On the general letter of interest form, there’ll be a line for you to indicate if you’re a queer or trans person with an animal companion, and your animal can be in body or in spirit. Tell me your animal’s name and if you’d like to be considered for the $500.

The last 5 $500 grants I want to give to folks open to receiving a reading from me in public – ie during our first money investor appreciation event or on youtube.

So yes, you’re hearing that right. Usually if you want some kind of divination reading you will have to pay someone something like $500, give or take. I myself charge like this, and I might again in the future.

But right now, I want to give you money, to read for you. For these 5 people, I’m giving you dealer’s choice. You can choose animal communication, quantum astrology, numerology, clairvoyant tarot, or spiritual diagnosis, or any Shaunga speciality. And you get $500 for that and a reading from Shaunga.

Only 20 people will get the $500 and 2-5 will get the larger grants. How am I going to decide who gets this money?

1 – alignment and resonance and 2 – timing, ie first come, first served. The alignment piece is that through the questions on the form I just want to make sure that we are in a good place to give and receive with one another.

But after that, for those who are in alignment, the folks who fill out the forms sooner than later will get higher priority.

Everything in the Entry Portal is optional.

If you wanted, you could pay the $99 just to get the discount on the bundles, if that’s what really interests you, and you don’t have to fill out the Letter of Interest forms.

You can fill out part one of the form and not part two. If you fill out part one, you don’t have to listen to the bundles.

You can go through one of the bundles or both. To be considered for a 5 or 10K grant, you have to listen to at least one of the bundles in order to comment on them, and you have to fill out both forms.

So, I hope that’s clear. Clear as mud? Here are the steps again.

When you finish listening to this introductory bundle, click the link to access the Entry Portal.

Pay the $99 at the gate. Then you’ll get access to the two Letter of Interest forms and two medicine bundles.

You decide what you want to do from there. You can just fill out part one, which snags you eligibility for everything in the general list. Or listen to one or both of the storytelling bundles and fill out both forms. That makes you eligible for everything.

This will all be written down on my website, and you can always email me if you have any questions.

Everyone who goes through the Entry Portal before our November 30 event will get access to the TRANS-ALIVELIHOOD investor appreciation event. If you want to give more during the money workshop from your field of generosity, you are absolutely welcome to, but you don’t have to in order to attend the event.

If you just want to attend the event, you can absolutely do that too.

If you’re like – I love this vision, I believe in it – but I don’t want to do any of these programs, I just want to participate in a more general way. Then you can totally just buy a ticket to the event, and that’ll be your investor contribution into public funding.

So that’s it. Now, I want to remind us – this only happens if we decide together, collectively, that we are willing.

If we’re going to make a public funding system work, we have to understand in a moment like this, you will witness a smaller number of people get a grant, and a larger amount of people will have to contribute to make that happen.

In other words, not everyone who wants a grant from this first pot will get one. We actually NEED more people to give, in order for a smaller number of people to receive.

So, a big motivating factor for you go through my Entry Portal might to get your name in the hat – yes please I want a grant – but your deeper motivation has to be the desire to return to a thriving village way of life.

In the thriving village, the person next to you wins sometimes when you lose. But we’re okay with that because we trust that when it’s our time to receive, we will. We trust that if we didn’t get something in one moment, from one person, then it wasn’t really ours. We understand that rejection leads you into a more authentic direction.

To give generously, when you know you may not be the direct recipient, teaches us to be happy when we see each other win – which I think is a really big skill we need to work on as a collective.

Not only that, in thriving communities, we have a stake in seeing others do well, receive gifts and opportunities, because we get that this causes a ripple effect that tangibly makes our personal lives better too. It’s like alternate timeline shit – look at all this stuff that went to hell if Buffy never made it to Sunnydale. Look at all these beautiful things that never came to pass in your life because the person sitting next to you didn’t get something good.

I’m telling you this, because if I don’t reach my minimum amount of grant money, whatever money I do raise is going to cover my livelihood and fortify my base. Whatever little I can give afterward, I will.

I want to create this protocol to begin with, to ensure that if I raise $5000, you don’t expect that I’m going to still do the 60/40 split.

I need to make it very clear to you – I’m not doing this whole thing, this whole motherfucking project just for shits and giggles, excuse my french. I’m not trying to be trendy or noticed or cooler than everyone else.

No, I’m very concerned about my bottom line just like most people are. This is actually my best option more than anything else. But, I need to care for my financial reality or else I’m fucked. I can’t afford it, basically, to play around with my livelihood.

I feel really good about getting paid for putting out this incredible free medicine bundle, even if this is all that comes out of it. I feel really good about hosting an amazing event, no matter how many people show up, with incredible services for my community. And if me getting paid a little bit at the end of all of that, is meant to happen out of this, then so be it.

Of course I want this to be massively successful, so I can give more to more people. I feel confident in my ability to do that, and to hold that.

But I want to bring this back to a village principle as well. My friends and I were talking the other day about how some really amazing small businesses and community spaces closed down recently. When this happens we often have the reaction like – oh no, that’s so sad! But most of the time, we haven’t done that much to support that space to stay open. We stopped buying from them, we stop paying attention to what they’re talking about, we stopped going to their events, we didn’t check to see if they’re okay.

There’s a principle that reminds us, in a village, we feel each other’s losses. Even if you don’t consciously see it, believe me when a healer closes their practise, everyone feels it. When a storyteller stops telling stories, everyone feels it. When an essential service shuts down, regardless if you directly used it or not, everyone feels it.

So many things get harder, there’s a ripple effect, and you don’t even realize you’re feeling the impact, but you are.

So, if I don’t reach my goal here – it’s not that I want you to feel guilty or bad that you didn’t make it happen for me. Things don’t work out sometimes, they don’t go according to plan. If this doesn’t work out, something better is out there for me.

But I want to honour the reality, that if I don’t get my grant, neither do you. If we are not willing, we all feel that loss. I’m not going to push myself past my limits, so that I can deliver you a promise that I didn’t get myself.

Yeah, I want this 300,000 by the end of November. That would be a really good pay day, to say the least.

All the time, we tell the Universe about the most precious and important things we want. We tell our relationships what we want. And sometimes, it’s not that we just want it, we really need it. Still, no one person owes us anything.

But what happens when we really feel each other in what we want, and when we see what could be possible when someone next to us gets what they want. What are we willing to do about it?

Lastly, I want to tell you just a little bit more about the two storytelling medicine bundles in the Entry Portal.

Both medicine bundles touch deeply for Grievers, Dreamers, devoted Earth Stewards and people who are really committed to opening their hearts to experiences of healing intimacy, and healing community.

There are moments in both bundles that touch on deep grief, and I offer my arms to folks who really need to be in rooms where the truth of our grief is welcome. I also offer many moments of levity, grounding, clarity, humour, because that’s what grief is too.

The second bundle on the end of life journey, leans more into the grief support and grief journey. It focuses on sharing lessons I’ve learned from ushering animals through the death portal, but the medicine is relevant for anyone on a grieving journey, or going through death and rebirth phases in life.

The second bundle leans more into possibility models for healing sex, partnership and love, by learning to look at what our most seminal break-ups from a different angle than we’re used to.

I chose both of these for the Entry Portal, because they’re me. Who I am in these two storytelling journeys is a very clear expression of who I am in this moment, September 2025, and what it’s like to sit next to me in circle.

The truth is, the garden I grow here, is born from my grief. When you really learn to honour where your grief comes from, you realize that it is your most powerful form of love, and your most powerful form of wealth.

When we talk about the power of public funding, and bringing that power back to the village, our most sustainable form of resourcing each other will also come from our grief, our wealth, our love.

In the last chapter of the second medicine bundle, the end of life journey, I tell a story about how I held my loved one, my cat Estha, as he took his last breath. Then, over two years since that moment, I saw that breath become my entire world. I saw how he became a giant in the sky, and I tell you a story about how his last breath became a breath that stopped a genocide.

If you want to sit next to me in circle, this is the simplest and most powerful thing that I have to tell you – this is how I breathe now. I’ve lived and died in this garden, and this is how I breathe now. I am changed by these losses.

Even if you don’t resonate with the type of grief we explore in this medicine bundle, it’s a gift to have the opportunity to sit in circle with one another and listen to each other’s stories.

Estha’s last breath IS the breath that created the entire SPIDERWOMAN NETWORK. It IS the breath that wakes me up every day, that continues to pour into this garden and offers nourishment, every day. It IS the breath of life flowing through everything I do.

If you’re here with me, come through the entry portal and sit with these stories. Allow the medicine to help you clarify how do you really want to spend your time right now?

When you know that, how can your village support you?

That’s it for section eight. I have one last voice note for you, section nine, with some special easter eggs and a very important dedication.

Alright, Good Listeners – Easter Egg time. You may have noticed that every section of this bundle comes with a colour: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, shades of purple, aka magenta, orchid, violet, hot pink elephant, prismatic and this one – solid gold.

Like I mentioned, I curate my apothecary medicine bundles by assigning stories as elements or primordial directions, or taking you through a storyteller’s chef’s menu.

When I starting putting together this village grant bundle, I thought it would be organized accordingly…but then, the way it was shaping up I was like no, it’s not a menu, it’s not colours this time, that’s not right, what is this – OH, IT’S COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW!

Everything clicked. In 2021 I went through an ancestor healing apprenticeship with one of my beloved teachers and peers, Dr Stephanie Burns. During this apprenticeship, she assigned everyone in the group a card from a specialized deck she uses with a message of guidance from our Ancestors, and she also assigned each of us a song from her “Ancestor Radio.” The song would also have special significance, meaning and guidance for each of us.

The meaning of the card I was given translated to: “the colours of the community.” That’s it. What does that even mean? Who knows?

The song she gave me was “Blue Moon” by Beck. I hadn’t heard this song before she gave it to me, but when I listened to it for the first time I really liked it. The first lyrics are: I’m so tired of being alone.

In the very first episode of magical reality tv for the revolution, my first podcast episode I published on September 4 2022, at that point I didn’t know the extent of the project I had taken on, but I titled that first episode “GOLD.”

Here, I told the story about how I had gotten this message from my Ancestors via Dr. Burn’s class – the colours of the community. And how our friend Akinke had inspired me to travel into the multiverse and find this giant quantum library – and all of it was gold.

There’s something else about the card I was given – the name was “colours of the community” but the card itself reminded me of the 5 of pentacles in the tarot deck. That card is associated with poverty or lack or genuine scarcity. It’s not not having access to life saving resources you need.

Putting that together with this song, “Blue Moon” – someone who is so tired of being alone.

In the Ancestor healing journey, when you get messages they are meant to unfold over time again and again. You understand the meaning, but as life unfolds you experience the meaning on deeper and deeper levels.

At the time I got the messages, the two things together really spoke to where I was at with community. I have prioritized a lot of solitude in the last several years. I went really deep, I went deeper and deeper into my aloneness.

The more I went into my aloneness, the more I found the wealth and community of my Ancestors. The more I found the vibrancy of the spirit world, and the abundant connection I had to all of nature, my non-human relatives, and their incredible aliveness.

At some point in the last couple years, I was talking to my friend Sze-Yang who witnessed the journey I was on – the choice I made to turn away from the world, so to speak. Sze-Yang said to me that day, Shaunga, I think the World wants you back.

When they said that, it really landed. I knew it was true. But I don’t always really know what that means either.

A couple years ago, I was in a session with a healer, a reader, and she said – there’s something about the play you wrote, PLUTO. When you’re ready to pick it up again, it’ll be your way of coming back into community.

If you’re wondering where the name SPIDERWOMAN comes from, it comes from this play I wrote called PLUTO.

SPIDERWOMAN is the first character who officially speaks and kicks off the entire journey, which is basically a love and loss story between Jupiter and Pluto who shape shift and travel through time.

SPIDERWOMAN has appeared multiple times on my podcast too. To me, she is not just a character, she is an ancient ancestor who lives in the core of the Earth. She comes from really old mythology in my lineage, and there are many lineages of course that have a similar mythology of a SPIDERWOMAN or SPIDER BEING.

Circling back to one of our foundational research questions for Spiderwoman’s Storyteller, Producer and Showrunner’s Guild.

I keep asking myself, what is the role of a producer or a producer’s guild in The Village Way, if it’s not what they do in hollywood.

For so long as was like ah, what is it. And then it hit me like – oh it’s a garden. It’s a community garden. I’ve only been saying it this whole time.

In the spirit of a community garden, we recognize that if it feeds the entire community, it must be cared for and tended to by the community as well.

But this is where I live. Not everyone who cares for the garden lives here, but I do. This garden needs to feed me, first and foremost.

I’ve already died here. I will have to keep living and dying here, many times over. No matter how far and wide this system is meant to spread, this garden must feed me first, and that always has to be true.

I say this because I consider myself, and I am, a storyteller community mother. I am part of a great legacy of other storytellers who raise communities through their words, their libraries, their wisdom, their vulnerability. I am a community auntie. I have played such a role in a village for over a decade. Mothers of all kinds, Mothers of all genders, we have to be real that this is still an exploited class of workers. We are still in habit of expecting caregivers, including community caregivers to give a lot and never ask for much in return.

The hollywood model teaches us to pour our money into amazon prime, netflix, disney plus, and that’s how we get our storytelling needs met, our entertainment needs met. But those are corporations. Remember when that documentary came out called “the corporation” and reminded everyone that corporations were designed as lifeless entities, so that humans could get rich and nobody could hold them accountable for anything.

We’re used to pouring our money in said entity and getting our perks. Because we do get perks – we don’t have to think about netflix as a human being with needs, just a machine that will keep pumping out entertainment. You probably don’t think too much about how exploited the artists are when you watch TV, I certainly don’t, and I think about this stuff all the time.

There are many moments throughout my career that I noticed people treat me like this, and treat other storytellers and healers and community mothers like this. Like I’m just a divination machine. Like I’m supposed to be amazon pumping out astrology readings. Like I only exist to create space for others, and feed others. But when I take a break or prioritize feeding myself, you get mad. You feel like I’ve betrayed our agreement somehow.

Because I have. I do, and I will continue to betray the agreement that hollywood has taught us.

When I was sitting down to create this medicine bundle, a song popped into my head.

Ever since Stephanie Burns’ class, my Ancestors have been obsessed with Ancestor Radio. They drop songs into my head like they’re playing records.

The song they popped in my head, also has the word “Blue” in the title. It’s called, “Beautiful Blue” by Holly McNarland. One of the lines is,

this is where I live

this is where I do my screaming

It hit me like yes, this garden is where I live. It is where I do my screaming. It’s where I grieve and where I rage. “beautiful blue” I haven’t listened to this song for many years, but I love this song, and I used to listen to it all the time, around 2004, 2005. You know you hear a song and it just takes you back to a time period in your life.

I was listening to this song a lot before I moved across the country to the city I’m in now, that I’ve lived for the past 20 years. That was the first time I really moved away from my family, from everything that I’ve known, and there were many songs that held me, gathered me, and carried me through that huge gateway, including this song.

I listened to it again as I was doing this medicine bundle and it flooded back all these memories of who I was, before I moved here 20 years ago. The dreams that I had coming here. The most important things that I’ve experienced, the most amazing things and the most painful things, are things I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.

In listening to this song again, I was like – what is this song actually about, according to the writer? I don’t even know. So I looked it up. After some sleuthing, it seems like she originally wrote this song in the aftermath of 9/11. These are the lyrics in the chorus:

dreaming

under this ugliness

waking up to all of this

beautiful blue

beautiful you

I read someone say that she said in an interview once, this was about looking at all the ugliness going on in the news, juxtaposed with waking up with her newborn baby. And taking care of this beautiful child as so many overwhelmingly ugly things happened in the world around her.

Now, I don’t know this artist too well. I don’t know her political views or anything like that, or what she was really thinking with these lyrics, but in terms of Ancestor Radio it made sense to me, why my Ancestors would put this song in my head now, why I’ve always loved it, why I’ve always felt it so deeply.

There are so many parallels to 9/11 in this moment. 9/11 triggered so much Islamophobia, it gave the world permission to target Arab folks and browns and muslims at a much greater ferocity. It gave permission to incessantly bomb the so-called “middle east” and enact extreme military violence in that area of the world, for the sake of resource extraction and corporate greed. Of course, we’re seeing that right now.

We’re under this ugliness, and I’m also holding so much beautiful blue. I’m holding this beautiful baby, this garden, that is mine to protect and grow and nurture. We’re holding the promise of so much that is here to exist and become all the healing and freedom we were born to see.

When I think about what “blue” means – it takes me back to water. It takes me back to Water as my Primordial Ancestor. Our Original Ancestor here on the planet. As an Altar Carrier, “blue” takes me to the West.

In the West side of an altar we have the guardians of Water.

[sounds of water]

We have the Grandmothers. The Spiritual Custodians. The Clean Up Crew. The beloveds who catch and hold the new baby. The leaders who care for the End of Life journey with the most skill, strength, delicacy, and reverence.

In the “blue” we have the ones who teach us to hold, and hold, and hold and hold…the ones we must seek permission from, before we let go of anything.

The west, the “blue” are the ones who Grieve. The ones who Work. The ones who make the hardest sacrifices, for all of us to find a greater and truer generosity.

If I could distill the biggest lesson we have learned telling me or us over the last 20 years, the blue, is that “we have to feed ourselves first.”

A prayer, a promise, a requirement, an impossible thing to learn that we are still learning.

“We have to feed ourselves first” is a core village principle written in the foundation of this village artist grant system.

It comes from the blue – the storyteller community mother – who has to recognize there are many moments where it really isn’t true, and it really isn’t right to feed ourselves first. Our first inclination is never to do that, it’s always to think about who we care for.

We think that’s always a shortcoming. It’s not. It’s only dangerous in a village that will seek to exploit that truth, and take advantage of that generosity, instead of protect it.

I’m sorry, but if I’m on a plane and it’s going down, I am for dang sure putting the oxygen mask on my kid before I put it on myself. If there’s a burning building, I’m going back in for the dog. I’m going in for the cats. Get out of my way.

After I realized the significance of the colour blue in this bundle, and our Ancestor radio theme song, I looked back on section 5 which is the blue section. What was that about again?

Here, blue is about looking at everything that is possible to see with this Village Artist Grant System, if we are willing to invest in it.

I come back to this young person, 21 years old, coming to this city for the first time. Holding everything that is possible, to see and experience here. I look at what is possible then, and what is possible now.

I keep saying, the city I live in, but I haven’t yet named it. I did that intentionally.

We often do land acknowledgements first, but this time, I needed to do it last.

I moved here, to Toronto, from Winnipeg in 2005. On September 4, yes the day that I officially published my first podcast episode in my public library.

It’s September 18 today, and I just crossed my 20 year anniversary of living here in this city.

The Indigenous name of Toronto is TKRONTO. You’ll see it spelled like “tkaronto.” The Mohawk translation of this name means the Trees that Stand in the Water. Referring to the fact that the Great Lakes live here. Toronto lives right next to Lake Ontario, which is the last Great Lake that spills into the St Lawrence River and Leads Water into the Ocean.

This is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee aka Six Nations, the Huron Wendat, Anishnabe, Petun, Missisaugas of the Credit River.

This is Dish with One Spoon territory. Dish With One Spoon is a Wampum belt, an agreement created between the Haudesaunee and the land itself. It’s an agreement that everyone who comes through this land must remain accountable to.

That is that there is just One Dish and One Spoon here. Everyone who is here, must agree to share the land responsibly and peacefully. Everyone here must learn to take what they need, generously, and leave enough for others, generously.

This is a very important agreement, especially given that there are so many different nations and tribes who have historically cared for the land here and they have different ways of life. Different technologies, different perspectives. Not everyone gets along all the time and not everyone is meant to.

But when we’re here, we’re here in spirit of the harvest table, the vibrant, colourful marketplace, the incredible legacy of creative and spiritual power, we’re here in spirit of a community garden.

If there’s one thing that Dish With One Spoon teaches you it is the impossible complexity, the never ending layers of meaning and unapologetic simplicity of what it means to share.

I can’t talk about land acknowledgement without talking about my love story with this land. How do I acknowledge 20 years of life here? Life, death and miracles.

I never planned to come here. Growing up in Manitoba I dreamed of going to Montreal and study music there. Then I thought I’d go to New York. Maybe NYU or Juliard. Or maybe I’d just go straight to California. Those were the cities that called to me, Toronto never did.

Until I was 20 years old. I was in the middle of a major grief journey. Everything I thought my life would look like changed. One day I was sitting at my computer in Winnipeg and something tapped me on the shoulder. It was Toronto. Here. Come here. The western door is open. Just come.

It took me 5 minutes to make the decision. 20 years later, here I am. I came here with dreams. I wanted to find community. I wanted to find love. I wanted to find life long partnership, and life long friendship. I wanted to find the social life of my dreams.

I wanted to find something that would last. What I did find instead were things that didn’t last. Break-ups That Defined Me.

There are so many things that I didn’t find here. What I did find, was my healing.

I didn’t come here thinking that I would become a healer. I didn’t come here knowing that I already was one.

I didn’t find my dream social life here, but I did find a few small friendships that did miraculously last through monumental movements of life, death and spirit.

I wanted to find the love of my life here, in human form. Instead, I found them in cats.

I know now that’s why I came here. For Estha and Rahel, who were born here and died here. I was their mama.

When I remember listening to that song, 20 years ago, “beautiful blue” – imagining everything my life could look like, imagining everything that could be possible as I travelled through that huge gate…I wasn’t a community mother back then. But now I am. Now I always will be.

Thanks to this place.

When I listen to that song now, I close my eyes and I see my 21 year old self, as old as the world card in the tarot. I see everything that happened over the last 20 years, like pages flipping through a book, during a 4 minute song. By the time she gets to the last chorus, I see myself as I am, now. Preparing to get back on stage and sing again, for the world.

I had to do my acknowledgement of Dish With One Spoon last because, this whole system IS my acknowledgement. This IS my translation of the Dish With One Spoon.

This IS what it means to share.

This IS my honouring to the land – the trees, the water. It IS my commitment to live by these promises.

It is my unending gratitude for hosting me here. It is everything we learned together.

It’s my way of saying I was here. I am here. This is how I see you. This is how I recognize you.

This is my garden, these are my flowers, and it’s for you. Toronto, TKRONTO.

Especially the blue, the water. The lake. Niigaani Gichigami. She, who goes first. She, who leads.

I dedicate this ECOSYSTEM to you. We usually do dedications first, but I’ll do it last because how do you define Dish With One Spoon? How do you tell people what it is?

It’s all of it. It’s every word that just I said, exactly how I said it.

The gift you gave me. Now I’ll give it to the world.