What would you do with a 300K Village Artist Grant in 2026?
No inaccessible application process. No proving your worth or respectability politics. No staying small and quiet, keeping your head down, or “behaving,” in order to keep your funding. No chasing big corporate studio heads. No more wishing they would ‘pick you.’ No endless hustling with entrepreneurship or employment to keep the lights on.
Just – funding. Just, spending your time and energy with what matters most. Just devoting to your most life changing, paradigm-shaking offerings, and to the beloved labour of every day life.
And, not just any kind of funding. Not a pool of money waiting to be extracted from, but an investment in thriving village funding practices.
Collective money moving strategies that protect the integrity of our ancestor healing journeys.
An ongoing, repeatable, (r)evolutionizing system of exchanging money, that holds us accountable to the emergence of ancestor-honouring, earth-honouring economies.
It has taken me many years of research, lived experience, community caregiving, oracle visioning and decolonizing ancestor healing work to offer you what I have today: a technology, methodology, and praxis for a Village Artist Grant (Eco)System.
THIS SYSTEM GIVES US A WAY TO GIVE, RECEIVE, EXCHANGE AND RAISE ARTIST GRANTS FOR ONE ANOTHER, WITHOUT HAVING TO GO THROUGH AN EXTERNAL FUNDING SYSTEM.
PHOTO: THAT’S ME (SHAUNGA) PERFORMING AT ONE THREAD WEAVES THE WORLD, A FUNDRAISER FOR FREE P/ALESTINE IN TKARONTO ORGANIZED BY SZE-YANG LAM & TRIXI JONES (NOV 2024). IMAGE: A BLACK AND RED SPARKLY BACKGROUND. A BENGALI PERSON IN A YELLOW DRESS WEAVES A DANCE ON STAGE.
This system is designed to activate, inspire, move and direct money into people, projects, purposes and paradigms that protect our need to heal, get free, divest from colonizing industries + earth-destroying ways of life, and invest in each other’s humanity instead.
VILLAGE FUNDING IS FOR…
🌊 slow seasons of business, writing or creation
🌊 beginning or ending phases of beloved projects
🌊 major initiations and portals of your healing journey
🌊 urgent personal or planetary matters pressing on your heart
☀️ It’s consistent funding to support a dream you’ve been trying forever to get off the ground…one that you’ve just about given up on…
☀️ Even though you know the planet sorely needs what you have to offer.
🌈 It’s repeatable funding for your collective projects to operate with a great amount of spaciousness, so your team can move slow, go deep, and work at the speed of the Ancestors…
🌈 With every bit of funding you need to support that.
most crucially, it’s for the most important parts of life, livelihood and labour we’re made to believe we could never / should never get paid for:
🌺 unexpectedly ushering a loved one through the death portal
🌺 spending time replenishing and recharging with your friends
🌺 going on full nerd mad spiritual scientist community inventor mode
🌺 incubating and exploring a creative project even if it may not amount to anything
🌺 slowing down and listening more, reading more, in places you need to develop your skills, gifts and (un)learn
🌺 quieting down for a season while focusing on making food for your chosen family
🌺 traveling to the ocean and singing to the water because that is what your grief needs
🌺 parenting, homeschooling, earth stewardship, animal companionship
🌺 sitting in silence at the altar and just listening
All of it is labour. Beloved labour. I don’t want to live in a world where we always have to “figure out” how to “monetize” the most important parts of our devotion and dedication.
Join Us on December 6 from 1-4pm EST on zoom for a Game Changer’s Circle & Safe Passage Ceremony.
I’ll be co-hosting this circle with my long-time dear friend, Ravyn Wngz, who is the first major recipient of my dream for a Village Artist Grant System.
We’ll open our circle by welcoming our most beloved and miraculous (Tr)ancestors into the space. We’ll ground into the energy of Safe Passage – for ourselves, our loved ones, for 2026 and beyond.
Then we’ll share a presentation of the research, technology and principles of this system. Ravyn and I will take you through how we are organizing our first 300K Giant Village Artist Grant.
We’ll break down the who, what, why, where and how this type of wild sausage gets made, as well as how we’d like to share the money we raise with our communities.
We want you to leave with a clear understanding of our vision, methodology and praxis:
🕸️ How do we make it possible to raise rapid-fire 6-figure artist grants for self-determined purposes, without having to rely on outside funding bodies to give us what we need?
🕸️ What is the specific money moving strategy, and how do we make it fun, enjoyable, accessible, easeful and efficient?
🕸️ How did we design a system that requires us to leave behind colonial charity and saviourship forms of monetary exchange?
🕸️ How do we do this for the first time? How do we make this repeatable? How can more people receive village artist grants as the practise grows? How do we sustain this movement?
If you’re interested, curious or longing for an ecosystem where ongoing Village Funding is thriving, accessible and available to you…where people are investing in a way of life that protects the emergence of ancestor-honouring, earth-honouring economies…then we want you in the room with us on December 6.
As you take in our presentation we want you to imagine more of what you want out of Village Funding.
We want us to collectively vision and get excited about the miracles we can create together.
We want to know more about what you’re working on, what you’re visioning, and how it’s weaving with what we’re putting on the table.
We want to know where it’s landing in you, and what it’s opening up in you.
We want to leave this circle knowing more about what we can’t see on our own.
During the presentation we’ll guide folks to reflect on how a system like this can help you find more support for your financial, creative, spiritual, communal and planetary needs.
We’ll encourage folks to feel into the places where you + your loved ones need safe passage, and speak those needs into the circle.
WE MAY HAVE TIME! FOR A COUPLE PEOPLE TO RECEIVE A PERSONAL ‘SAFE PASSAGE’ ORACLE READING FROM ME. THE MESSAGES DELIVERED DURING THESE READINGS WILL BE SUPPORTIVE TO THE GROUP AND OUR CEREMONY AS A WHOLE. CHECK OUT MY STYLE ON MY “ORACLE READINGS FOR EARTH HONOURING ECONOMIES” YOUTUBE SERIES.
To close the circle, Ravyn and I will share a sound bath we’ve created specifically for this portal: keeping our hearts, spirits and bank accounts resourced during times like these.
This offering comes from our commitment to our own Trans Alive-Lihood, and co-created via our long-time practise with Ancestor Theatre, Celestial Theatre and Abolitionist Theatre.
The sound bath ensures that all requests for support and dreams we spoke or felt during the circle are heard, blessed and protected by our Greatest Ancestors and Futures.
It helps you energetically attune to your personal path of safe passage and miracles.
We extend the protection and blessing of this offering to the communities and parts of ourselves that are most vulnerable during these times.
🦋 🦋 🦋
as we close we’ll leave you with info on:
🕸️ how to participate, support and be part of the miracle, as we raise our first ever 6-figure self-determined village artist grant
🕸️ how to weave yourself into our first round of funding in January 2026 and benefit from our gift economy + community development funds
🕸️ how to raise village artist grants for your own livelihood, projects and communities with our support in 2026
🕸️ learn from our example and apply our model to your own art projects, creative practise, community development work, activism and/or business models
JOIN US
ON DECEMBER 6 2025
1-4PM EST
zoom link will be provided after you register
To attend our event, we ask that you make an offering to our first pot of village funding with an amount of your choice, that is your version of generous.
Be generous to yourself, to us, and to your dreams of co-creating an ecosystem of financial and communal sovereignty.
Your financial contribution will greatly assist and support us in the work that went into preparing and hosting this event, and as we organize what we need in order to meet our 300K goal in January.
When contributing to our pot, feel free to choose a number from our nifty Numerology Reciprocity Chart. You can find the chart on our free resources page.
If you cannot afford any amount of money to make an offering, or if you’d like to make a larger-extended offering to your monetary contribution, we are accepting non-monetary offerings by way of amplification and advocacy.
Please do something generous to share this invitation: send an email to your network, amplify on your platform, or text your friends the link. Please do something thoughtful and not offhand. Then email us and let us know what you’ve done to make a non-monetary offering, so we can send you the zoom link.
*sharing or re-posting my notes/posts on substack or threads / IG is super appreciated, if you have an active platform on any of these spaces! I am @otherworldlygiants on IG/threads and The Ancestors Writers Room on substack.
Email can be directed to: mercury@shaungatagore.com
REGISTER NOW
After you make your contribution, check the confirmation email for details on the zoom link. We’ll send out a reminder before the event starts.
HANG OUT BACKSTAGE WITH US
meet your hosts…
Shaunga is a weirdo, queerdo, multi-gendered Bengali Storyteller, Ceremonialist, Certified Nerd, and long-time Community Oracle. There is no proper word in the english language for her expansive gender identity, as it is a specific expression of her unique medicine, energy healing & the way her Trancestors dance through her in every day life. Estha and Rahel are Esteemed, Executive Producers of this event. They are Small Things, currently living large in the Spirit Realm. (alt text on photo.)
Ravyn Wngz is an Abolitionist, Storyteller, Afro-Indigenous 2SPIRIT, Black trans woman, all around miraculous human, and beloved friend. We’ll all be so blessed to imagine what miracles can occur when Village Funding resources Ravyn’s epic memoir, liberation theatre projects and nurtures the seeds of a community abolitionist journalism school into life. Photo credit: Jackie Brown.
(alt text on photo.)
Everyone who contributes an amount to our pot of village funding gets access to our backstage series: a friendship that can withstand the revolution.
Learn more about our series here.
for a deeper dive on on our research,
Read Shaunga’s
“Open Letter to My Peers“
3 thoughts on “Register for our Game Changer’s Circle”