we are building a social media playground for spiritual abolitionists, good listeners, and artists who work for the planet.
I am collaborating with a tech wizard to create a prototype for a social media playground, designed to directly serve the needs, interests and values of:
• ancestral dreamers, creators & visionaries
• medicine carriers, altar carriers & wisdom keepers
• activists, abolitionists & organizers
• teachers, students, parents, Elders & young people
• healing practitioners, crafts-people, artisans & service workers
• Black, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous land stewardship, healing & liberation
• collective care networks & audacious accessibility funding
• wealth building for people on a journey of spiritual decolonization and lineage/medicine reclamation
This is a queer and trans centered space, a survivor-centered space, sx work positive, a space that honours the role grief and joy play in revolutionary efforts.
A space dedicated to dismantling white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity and solidarity efforts across all realms, and build more kinship with our animal + plant + elemental relationships, communities in the “global south” and who are enduring the harshest impacts of colonization, genocide and late stage capitalism.
A SPACE ANCHORED BY:
• ancestor healing approaches + thriving village practices for complex social, political and (inter)personal concerns
• investment in a life path inspired by Spirit, magic, land, and the otherworldly
• sovereign village funding networks & financial protection for people losing income due to identity, activism, (un)expected social, political, familial or environmental circumstances, commitment to justice, or investment in an oppressed spiritual tradition
• financial protection for Grievers, Dreamers, Warriors, and the liminal spaces of life we hold most dear: transitions, new beginnings, the in-between and unseen realms of life
• financial protection for writers, artists, musicians, cultural workers, service providers, small business stewards, parents, and caregivers of all kinds: a place to build wealth, simply for the labour of creating, nurturing, raising and sustaining (regardless if you sell anything or not, regardless if you get the grant or not)
• community organizer training for audacious, revolutionary money moving strategies and labour advocacy that build consistent financial resourcing for the type of labour that keeps liberation alive, that no other paradigm will fund
• practices that feed into sovereign, thriving abolitionist villages, circles and networks, BIG art projects and ancestral assignments, life-saving (and perhaps unlikely) collaborations between folks working in different fields of wisdom
• the emergence of regenerative + reparative economic systems and a grief-centered, joy-filled, devoted way of life.
This special space on the internet will be reserved for people who want to see an interweaving, global thriving village emerge in our lifetime, and know that their unique love story with the universe is an integral part of seeing this vision come to life.
We want people whose primary concern right now is the planet, human and non-human life. We want to see us tipping the scales from climate disaster, ecological catastrophe, militarized violence (intimate and systemic), and grow wealth, healing, power and healing in the hands of devoted Earth Keepers.
This is a place where we prioritize love and attention on all angles of an altar. Our relationship with:
The North: the spiritual, galactic, cosmic, ancestral and adventurous (sky)
The East: the social, political, cultural and communal (fire)
The West: the personal, intimate and familial (water)
The South: the economic, financial, material and tangible (earth)
And Center: our relationship to our Self and the Unquantifiable – the reason you and I are here on the planet together at this time, the reason we are alive, and the truth of how we want to spend our time here while we have it.
the power of design.
What I know as a Spiritual Architect, long-time healing practitioner and devoted Altar Carrier, is that what you build into the foundational fabric of your design, creates an inevitable outcome.
The design of a tarot spread, or any kind of divination, creates an inevitable outcome. This is how a See-er offers a prediction (that can be transformed or altered by free will and self-determination).
The way you set up your altar creates an inevitable outcome, and this is how we engage ritual, ceremony and spellwork.
The way that lighting designers, costume designers and set designers welcome you into an adventure of a story, tells you something right away about who the story is. The design holds you and carries you, until we collectively arrive in the place the story has always been leading us.
Social media sties run by Big Tech are also designed to create intentional, inevitable outcomes. They are designed to create addiction, competition, isolation, and conflict in places there might otherwise be camaraderie. They are designed to feed into the ongoing destruction, exploitation and abuse of human and non-human life.
Many are asking for “alternatives.”
But my goal is to bring together a team – and a wider community – to apprentice THE ANTIDOTE.
Our goal is to create a social media design and prototype that builds:
• reciprocity & mutual exchange
• audacious models of collective care
• thriving village principles
• abolitionist wealth building
• inspired collaboration
• communally supported self-advocacy
• land-based offerings & star mapping
• ancestral wisdom traditions
…and everlasting love for our planet and non-human relatives – we build these not just into the foundational fabric of the design, but also in how we create the design, and grow, steward & nurture the space.
please help us kickstart
& see this dream come alive.
When you help us KICKSTART, we enter a 4-month Butterfly Sanctuary incubation adventure. Funds will be shared in the following areas:
✰ a spacious, supportive monthly income for myself and my “tech wizard” collaborator, as I guide them through an ancestor dreaming apprenticeship that shall feed into our design work, as well as support their spiritual & artistic development.
⇢⇢⇢ in many thriving village practices, the village gathered around two well purposed individuals to support a process of mentorship, guidance, mutual learning and co-creation. Today, it is a radical act for a village to support mutual exchange of shared learning between queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, disabled, people of colour – in places that transactional models of payment are not appropriate (this is not therapy or client-coaching), and so our relationships are preserved by each other, and not by the state, non-profits, charities or philanthropists.
✰ a small team of research consultants who will give ongoing feedback and support to our design: protocols, best practices, and addressing design solutions for complex social + political concerns.
✰ a beloved local Black + Afro-Indigenous land stewardship mission to hold this work, offer tangible space, support the process, receive land-based offerings, as well as receive the benefits of wealth and joy we create.
✰ generous resources for a collective care team supporting this work and the ability for our core collaborators to participate fully: city drivers, cooks, bodyworkers, caregivers, ASL-interpreters, grief-support, spiritual guidance and advisors.
Throughout the 4-month period, I will host regular circles of reciprocity and land-based offerings to the land spirits, guardians and elemental ancestors who protect, guide, and are a beloved part of the work. These will be shared both online and in-person.
These circles will be open to community members to give + receive care. They will be focused on building spiritual protection from the multi-facted impacts of Big Tech including data centers, data mining and AI.
People who offer contribution to our KICKSTARTER will be invited into the process to apprentice what it means to be abolitionist audiences for each other, instead of the kind of “audience” and “community” that Big Tech inevitably creates on the popular platforms, which are always rife with hatred, abuse and ongoing problems.
Here, we invite people to learn with us, what does it mean to build abolitionist audiences into the fabric of our design?
We’ll host a Town Hall at the end of the 4-months: we’ll share the prototype we created and get your feedback, reflections and ideas!
After this, we can invite interested parties to join a full-year of beta testing. Here, an audience can use this prototype of a social media playground for a year: experience what it’s like, enjoy the platform, run into snags or even conflict, bring us your concerns and areas you see that need extra tending. We continue to receive feedback and develop the design.
I’m asking for immediate support.
I’m Shaunga. I have spent the last 21-years working in Tkaronto queer/trans community as a devoted healing practitioner, artist, storyteller, grief worker, death doula and community auntie – and supported countless people in life-changing ways.
I have also experienced a great deal of abuse, including financial abuse, in intimate and community relationship over the last 2 decades.
In the last 3 years I lost a great deal of income, support and community, directly related to the nature of my activism, spiritual commitments and identity – including labour advocacy that many look down upon, sx work ethos, open & full-bodied support for a free p/alestine. I have lost community and support systems in ways I truly did not see coming.
Because of the nature of my caregiving work and experience with grief + abuse + survivorship, I have lost a great deal of physical mobility, endurance, stamina, and ability to move freely throughout the city + accomplish essential errands and self-support.
I’m looking for community excited and inspired to offer something generous – however small or large – to my KICKSTARTER aka Shaunga’s Thriving Village Pot.
The first wave of KICKSTARTER funds will go directly toward supporting my ability to lead and sustain this project: urgent accessibility needs, essential health + safety support and paying off debts from loss of income.
Then we’ll use the next wave of funding to support the full team, so we can get to work and rock and roll.
HELP US KICKSTART NOW
get hyped: a deeper dive
Get cozy and go on a 1-hr adventure with Shaunga, as she takes you through some of her preliminary ideas of what a social media playground for us could look like.
Shaunga is a Sagittarius Moon, Gemini Sun (with an accompanying Gemini stellium), and a Scorpio Rising. She has been incubating BIG and DEEP visions for many years on designs for earth-centered, reciprocal, regenerative, reparative economies…powered by her ancestral memories, mission and promise to see a global thriving village in her lifetime.
Meaning: don’t worry if you get a little lost in the sauce. Our goal when working with our tech wizard, is to bring these ideas into a simple and manageable prototype, that promotes joy, ease and excitement for our communities to explore during this first phase of development.
Tune in and feel inspired by what ideas unlock for you when imagining what could be possible. We want this world to serve you!