WHO WE ARE:

SpiritHouse is a multigenerational Black women- led cultural organizing tribe with a rich legacy of using art, culture and media to support the empowerment and transformation of communities most impacted by racism, poverty, gender discrimination, criminalization and incarceration. Since 1999, we have worked from our home base in Durham, North Carolina, to uncover and uproot the systemic barriers that prevent our communities from gaining the resources, leverage and capacity necessary for long-term self-sufficiency.

We are Black, monetarily poor, disabled, queer, and formerly incarcerated, grassroots organizers, artists, alchemists, strategists and healers. We are multi-generational, valuing the genius of Black youth and the lived experience and wisdom of our elders. We prioritize the leadership of the people at the center of the issue who are most impacted by systemic racism and oppression.

We say tribe because our embodied liberatory practices sustain cultural values that shift our everyday behavior. These practices ground our work and are carried into all of our community and collaborative spaces. Our greatest assets come from our lived experiences. As Black people in America, we carry generational biologically inherited trauma and freedom in our DNA. We therefore prioritize our need and our ability to give and receive deep, transformative, collective healing, rooted in our customs, rituals, resilience, radical imagination and true historical analysis.

SpiritHouse is fiscally sponsored by Alternate Roots, a southern regional arts service organization, where we have been members since 2007.