we create ourselves. we create our belonging. we create our freedom.
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Shaping Sanctuary: A Housing Cooperative Development Program
Shaping Sanctuary is a year-long cooperative development initiative that equips Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming (BTGNC) creative collectives with the tools, relationships, and infrastructure needed to build sustainable, community-rooted ecosystems of care.
The program supports collectives in designing shared strategies for creative practice, mutual aid, economic resilience, and long-term community stewardship. Shaping Sanctuary invests in the collective structures that allow communities to share resources, build power, and create lasting alternatives to extractive models of arts and community development.
Program Launch + Growth
URE hopes to launch the first 2027 to 2028 Shaping Sanctuary cohort in Fall 2027, bringing together eight BTGNC creative collectives for a year-long cooperative development process.
Each participating fellow will receive a $12,000 stipend for their participation in the program, providing direct economic support while they develop and strengthen their collective practices.
Our goal is to support eight fellows annually, creating an ongoing national ecosystem of BTGNC creative collectives that can share resources, knowledge, relationships, and strategies for sustaining their communities.
Through Shaping Sanctuary, we are working toward a future where BTGNC creatives are not only supported in surviving existing systems, but are resourced to collectively design and steward the spaces, economies, and cultural ecosystems we want to live within.
01
Systems
Each URE chapter cultivates cooperative living collectives housed in shared, low-income residences that function as spaces for collaboration, learning, and collective care. Together, participants develop systems that strengthen both the collective and its members, including community care plans, cooperative governance practices, financial planning, shared revenue models, resource-sharing agreements, and strategies for sustaining creative work over time.
02
Stewardship
The program integrates urban farming and sustainable food systems as both a community-building practice and a practice of self-sustainability. Collectives steward shared gardens that provide food, strengthen relationships, encourage environmental stewardship, and create opportunities for supplemental income through the sale or exchange of produce and value-added goods.
03
Support
Throughout the year, each collective receives coaching, technical assistance, and peer learning opportunities to design systems that reflect the unique needs of its members while contributing to the broader URE ecosystem. By the end of the program, every collective will have developed a community care strategy, cooperative operating practices, diversified revenue and resource-generation plans, and a roadmap for maintaining stable housing, sustaining creative work, and expanding its impact within its local chapter.
04
Solidarity
Shaping Sanctuary is designed for Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming creatives ages 18–50 who are committed to building collaborative futures where artistic practice, collective wellbeing, and economic sustainability are deeply interconnected.
