Creative Team
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Kelly 'Kel' George
she/her/ella
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Veronica Garcia
she/her/hers
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Jules (Scout)
they/she
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T Turner
they/she
Veronica Garcia (she/her/hers) was born in Los Angeles and raised on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. She has over 20 years of experience working with social justice nonprofit organizations and community groups on issues including health care disparities, anti-violence initiatives, LGBTQ equity, anti-racism, reproductive justice, food security, economic justice, and migrant rights.
Veronica is deeply committed to using the power of fundraising as a movement building strategy. She learned and internalized this powerful value as a graduate of the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training’s (GIFT) Internship Program more than 10 years ago. In the years since, Veronica has supported hundreds of community initiatives and social justice groups in building their grassroots fundraising capacity. Veronica also founded the Paso del Norte OUT Fund, a grant making initiative of El Paso’s LGBTQA community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and our allies) and the Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, a group committed to ending unjust and inhumane migrant detention across the southwest U.S. border region.
Veronica more recently launched the Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practitioners (WRAP), in partnership with a national network of social justice grassroots fundraisers, to recontextualize how social justice organizers think about and practice movement resourcing in the U.S. In addition to extensive real-world experience in the nonprofit sector, Veronica has a B.A. in Sociology and a Master of Nonprofit Management graduate degree.
Kelly ‘Kel’ George (she/her/ella) is an international public speaker, facilitator, and emotional well-being coach speaking loud and proud about mental health, emotional intelligence, and bipolar neurodiversity. Brooklyn, NY – Lenape land is her stomping grounds. As a Black-Latinx queer, bipolar neurodivergent, with roots in Panama and Trinidad salsa, calypso, and soca music are the language of her hips. Kel is risk positive and lives for blood-pumping, heart-pounding, daring activities from skydiving to kickboxing.
Kel came to healing justice and the Fireweed Collective in search of her own healing. During the journey, she found other comrades committed to community healing and invested in rewriting their narrative from an abolitionist perspective.
Kel founded Real Resilience Coaching & Consulting to coach and serve others to identify their resilience story, live in the power of their unique gifts, and support other daily mental health survivors. Real Resilience utilized a healing justice framework to address the knowledge gap within organizations on how to develop inclusive and psychologically safer work ecosystems that drive innovation and untapped human potential. Wanna talk more? Book a Call!
Jules (Scout) (they/she) is an organizer, event producer, and magic maker living in Coast Salish land in Seattle, WA. They love making beautiful and functional spaces. She expresses love for the collective by creating welcoming entry points & building programs that encourage belonging. Jules has worked with local and national organizations to prompt healing, combat consumer culture, and create decentralized collective power. When they are not in the details of gathering, they write about contemporary queerness, material resources, traveling, and how all these topics are connected. They do operations support for The HEAL Project and can be found at jpcreativeprojects.com
T Turner is healing, storytelling, and growing food, flowers, and pleasure practices along a mountain lakeshore. A budding herbalist and full bloom water witch, they seek daily magic. Her last twenty years span an Appalachian, liberation-centered journey of popular education, community media, and rural resilience. They dream of wild and free futures of joyous care. Her current offerings sprout from deep mountain healing traditions: herb medicine, storytelling magic, biomimicry and beyond. T’s paid work is in rural community and participatory philanthropy. Connect with her patreon coven at Tbturner.com
Influences
Healing Justice Lineages
In the anthology Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice—a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next.
The Nap Ministry
Founded by artist and theologian Tricia Hersey in 2016, The Nap Ministry are originators of the “rest as resistance” and “rest as reparations” frameworks, and creators of sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold. Their work is seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy.
Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective
The Kindred Collective is a network of grassroots energy, body and earth based healers and health practitioners seeking to create mechanisms for wellness and safety that respond, intervene and transform conditions of generational trauma and violence in our communities and movements.
Healing Justice was born in the wake of Katrina and Rita and in the shared struggle to fight the rise of post-9/11 fascism. We sought to map and elevate how our movements and communities build collective care, safety and protection for each other in the South. From these deep roots, the political framework of healing justice was conceived, and one year later in 2006, the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective was formally launched.
Astrologers
Demetra George is a professional astrologer who draws upon her background in mythology and ancient languages to create a unique synthesis of archetypal astrology and ancient techniques, along with travel to sacred sites. She is the author of many books, most recently the 2-volume Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice.
Chani Nicholas is a Los Angeles–based New York Times best-selling author and astrologer with a community of over one million monthly readers. She has been a counseling astrologer for more than 20 years, guiding people to discover and live out their life’s purpose through understanding their birth chart.
Disability Justice
Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities – in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors – moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.
Fireweed Collective strives to cultivate a culture of care, free of violence, where the ultimate goal is not just to survive, but to thrive as individuals and as communities. We envision a world in which all communities get to self-determine the source of their care, medicine, and wellness.
Collaborators
QT Care House shaped the content of the NOLA 8th House from a New Orleans bulbancha perspective.
Southern Organizer Academy serves to strengthen the leadership and capacity of Southern based folks to build power that creates social and structural change. We are rooted in a queer, feminist, abolitionist framework and believe that revolution is a verb , only possible through collective mass mobilization.
Trans Rememberance is a digital memorial honors the lives of those we've lost. It is a project of the National Center for Trans Equality.
shea in the catskills is a queer artist + tarotist supporting the 8th House through spiritual care work and website development.
Sponsors
WRAP
Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practitioners (WRAP) is a community of practice organized by and for Resource Mobilizers. Learn more>>
Kataly Foundation
The Kataly Foundation moves resources to support the economic, political, and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color. By transforming our relationship to capital, the planet, and each other, we will redistribute and redefine wealth in a way that leads to transformation, abundance, and regeneration. Learn more>>
Southern Movement Infrastructure Exchange (SMIE)
SMIE a new collaborative initiative dedicated to growing and strengthening a network of responsive, values-aligned fiscal sponsors and other intermediaries to grow, connect, and leverage their resources to fuel grassroots-led movements.
The project is led by the Campaign for Southern Equality and the Southern Vision Alliance, with support from the Out in the South Fund.
Production Partners
Creating Change
Hosted Annually by the National LGBTQ+ Task Force, the first 8th House Lounge happened at Creating Change in January 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Creating Change invested in this concept and lifts up cultural work emerging from queer community as the nation’s foremost political, leadership, and skills-building conference for the LGBTQ+ movement.
Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS)
The second 8th House Lounge happened in February 2024 in Los Angeles for the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) conference Jotería Pleasure: Re-Grounding Our Desires is organized around the interplay of pleasure, power, and decoloniality. AJAAS shares values with the 8th House and collaboration was expansive.
We place jotería at the center of current social and political uprising to confront the violent consequences of COVID-19 and other forms of oppression and loss. Within this context, we re-ground our jotería desires as necessary for our existence. Since existir es resistir, we re-center jotería desires as resistance to white supremacy, sexism, heterosexism, capitalist extraction, and the lasting legacies of coloniality. We recognize that by embracing the pleasures of life, we are reclaiming jotería as experience, practice, knowledge, performance, and artmaking. We acknowledge radical and liberatory pleasures, and possibilities, that lie with re-connecting spiritual worlds, past and present, with jotería futures. We prioritize the project of re-grounding ourselves, and our desires, in and to our cuerpos and lands. By re-grounding ourselves within jotería pleasure we are taking up space and we are taking our time.