Why the House of Possibilities?
Our vision for The House of Possibilities lives at the intersection of our theory of change, the labor we believe nurtures collective liberation, and the gifts, skills, and lived experiences we have to offer our community. Rooted in the beliefs that transformation is relational and that justice is practiced in place, our work lives in an emerging community-based organization in the Wedge neighborhood of South Minneapolis. With our neighbors and community, we want to dream and build the world we deserve through four areas of practice: growing food and relationships with each other and the land, creating art, stretching our imaginations through dialogue, and supporting the work and vision of young people within an intergenerational community. We look forward to the possibilities that will emerge from the fertile soil of community wisdom, abundance, creativity, curiosity, love, and joy.
We find deep joy and awe as students in every stage of our lives and becoming. Again and again, we are shaped by those who teach us—through word, presence, challenge, and example. The most important teachers in our lives have tended our spirits and stretched our imagination.
With deep gratitude, we want to share wisdom from some of the teachers whose ideas, labor and ways of being have helped shape our ideological root system and theory of change. Their teaching continues to echo through our questions, our commitments, and the way we move in the world. We name them below because we believe they offer knowledge and perspectives that can support our imaginations and the practices we create to build just and loving worlds together.
adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy, Holding Change, Pleasure Activism, We Will Not Cancel Us
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Undrowned, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
Andrea Ritchie: Practicing New Worlds
Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider
Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown: How to Survive the End of the World
Battlestar Galactica
bell hooks: Teaching to Transgress, All About Love
Frida Kahlo
Grace Lee Boggs: Living for Change, The Next American Revolution
Justseeds Artist’s Cooperative
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba: Let This Radicalize You
Mariame Kaba: We Do This Til We Free Us
Mia Birdsong: How We Show Up
Norma Kawelokū Wong: When No Thing Works, Who We Are Becoming Matters
Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents
Prentis Hemphill: Becoming the People, Finding Our Way, What It Takes to Heal
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, The Serviceberry
Sigmar Polke: Frau Herbst und ihre zwei Töchter (Mrs. Autumn and Her Two Daughters)
Susan Raffo: Liberated to the Bone
Starhawk: The Fifth Sacred Thing
Star Trek