Vision & Values

The Vision

  • Community care is a constellation of practices that affirm our dignity and wholeness. Community care is political. Community care is imperfect and ongoing. Community care is adaptable and multidimensional. Community care is responsive and preventative. Community care nourishes every area of our lives: our minds, our bodies, our spirits, and our landscapes. Community care is how we continually choose each other's liberation and healing.

    Fortuna Major Creative Co will nourish constellations of care that disrupt individualism. From education, public art, peer support, and storytelling -- our efforts will be directed toward dreaming of and cultivating a more just, liberated world for all.

  • Political education is not merely the collection and distribution of information and stories. Instead it is the continual practice of learning and unlearning domination. It is following and uplifting the expertise of those most impacted. It is a tool to build collective power. We must reflect on the stories of the past to understand the present and dream of the future. We must honor the lives of those who came before us by embodying the futures we seek.

    Fortuna Major Creative Co. will encourage political action through creative education to support liberation movements. Fortuna Major Creative Co. will actively work to materially contribute to and uplift the work of community organizers, healers, and cultural catalysts.

  • Power works through shaping narratives. Narratives shape our communities. Our communities shape us. Our creative work, and the narratives we weave with it, will always exist in conversation with history, culture, and community. We cannot and do not create in isolation.

    By being a hub for artists, storytellers, healers, organizers, and cultural catalysts to connect and collaborate, Fortuna Major Creative Co. commits to building collective power. Power built through the constellation of community care, political education, and creative action.

Our Values

  • "I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other."
    -Kimberlé Crenshaw

    All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more. Our bodyminds cannot be separated from these systems and cultures. Therefore, we cannot and do not live single issue lives. Intersectionality in practice is continually seeking to learn about our interconnections and resist our domination through political action.

  • “If it is not accessible to the poor, it is neither radical nor revolutionary.”
    -Anonymous

    More often than not, the people who need access to healing services and creative offerings the most are also frequently the people who have significantly less financial flexibility due to systemic barriers. Sliding scale pricing, payment plans, and free offerings are implemented wherever possible to create greater access to transformative care and community.

  • “A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.” -Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

    Disability justice and accessibility are the loving balance between autonomy and (inter)dependence; personal and collective struggle. It is the practice of being responsible to each other and to ourselves. It is a commitment to being proactive not just reactive to the differences of our bodyminds.

  • "No one said harm reduction is easy. No one said it’s easy to love someone. Love is hard. Love is work. Love is commitment. Love is messy. Love can exist in the greys and blues, the hues of a spectrum based on feeling, lessons, and intuition."
    -Temperance Rivera

    Harm reduction is an approach centered in dignity, human rights, self-sovereignty, and compassion. It encompasses a range of intentional, evidence-based practices and policies designed to lessen the negative social and/or physical consequences associated with various human behaviors.

    Harm reduction is more than abstinence from harmful actions and behaviors. In practice, harm-reduction asks us how can we be safe enough? How can we follow a path to care and change that feels level enough? How do we support each other in ways the create the least harm possible here now and in the future? The answers to these questions will likely change moment to moment, day to day, month to month, and year to year.

  • “Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community”
    -adrienne marie brown

    Every creative vision takes an abundance of resources to create—not just materially or financially, but resources like connection and belonging are vital to the creative process, too. How do we collect and cultivate resources for our creative visions? How do we embody more just futures?

    We build relationships.

    Central to relationship building is the everyday practice of our principles. In relationship building, the process can be so much more important than what is produced. When we live what we believe in—however imperfectly—we build trust in ourselves and each other. Quality over quantity. Slow is fast.

Sliding Scale

“If it is not accessible to the poor, it is neither radical nor revolutionary.”

  • Sliding scale pricing is a type of tiered fee structure where people with fewer resources are responsible for paying a lower fee. The lowest tier provided on any offering is below base cost, while the highest tier is beyond base cost. When you are able to select a higher tier on the sliding scale you “pay it forward” for those with less financial flexibility as well as support the larger visions & offerings of Fortuna Major Creative Co.

    Sliding scale pricing is implemented wherever possible as part of Fortuna Major Creative Co.’s commitment to economic justice & accessibility. Most offerings are also available for payment plans, upon request.

  • For most offerings, you self-select along the provided sliding scale. This system relies upon your honest evaluation of what is comfortable to you, as well as recognizing that the lowest tiers of the sliding scale are meant to prioritize access for Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color, trans women and trans femmes, folks raised working class or poor, and people with disabilities.

    • Choose the highest tier of payment if one or more of the following apply: you are comfortably able to meet your basic needs, own a newer car and/or home or rent a higher end property, have access to financial savings, have reliable work or do not need to work to meet your needs, have investments, can afford to travel every year, have expendable income.

    • Choose the higher middle tiers of payment if one or more of the following apply: you sometimes stress about meeting basic needs but still regularly achieve them, are able to buy some new items and thrift others, can travel every couple/few years without burden, have some debt but it does not prevent access to basic needs/wants.

    • Choose the lower middle tiers of payment if one or more of the following apply: you have very limited expendable income, are unemployed or have unstable employment but are still able to meet basic needs, have little to no access to savings or financial support from family, have higher debt that requires some sacrifices on needs/wants.

    • Choose the lowest tier of payment only if: you struggle to meet your basic needs and paying would be a significant hardship.

Our Lineage

of Influence

  • Fortuna Major Creative Co. was directly born out of the work of Survivor Arts Collective—a community of healing, empowerment, & activism providing peer support, mutual aid, violence prevention training, and transformative justice education for a world free of sexual and relationship violence.

    To learn more about Survivor Arts Collective visit this link.

  • Project LETS builds peer support collectives, leads political education, develops new knowledge and language around mental distress, organizes and advocates for the liberation of our community members globally, and creates innovative, peer-led, alternatives to our current mental health system.

    Project LETS has significantly influenced Fortuna Major Creative Co.’s understanding of harm-reduction and the decarceration movement. To learn more about Project LETS visit this link.

  • Relational Uprising is a nonprofit training and coaching institute with a mission to build resilient, interdependent, and relational culture within organizations and communities working for social change.

    Material from Relational Uprising’s Relational Culture Framework has been deeply impactful for integrating art, activism, and healing modalities within Fortuna Major Creative Co.’s offerings. Lachlan was first introduced to Relational Uprising’s work in their time studying at Hampshire College as an undergraduate. Specifically, they were introduced to Relational Culture through mentorship provided by the Ethics and the Common Good Project, with special thanks to Javiera Benevente and Teal Van Dyck.