Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center
Donation protected
Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center
Collective Survival Pending Abolition
Making Worlds is a nonprofit cooperative bookstore and social center for collective freedom. We aim to build abolitionist and climate-adapted autonomy and ecological self-determination, defend against displacement and gentrification, and bring community together with the affirmation of worlds imagined and made by Black, Brown, and Indigenous traditions of liberation.
As many of supporters in our community know, we opened our doors on February 14, 2020 with enormous heart and hope and optimism about the future. We had to close our storefront on March 15, 2020 due to the pandemic. After months and months of hard work planning and building this project, we were open for exactly 30 days.
This fundraiser is a call to help us open up again. Six months into the pandemic, one of the hardest obstacles in our way is paying off our credit card bill, which ballooned to $18,425.13 (with fees and interest compounding) in the weeks before we opened when we were tightest on funds and had no additional access to money to open, but were so close to opening!
Please consider helping us wipe out this debt so we can stop digging ourselves out of a debt trap it will take forever to escape!
If we can pay this bill off, we can open—and if we can open, we can survive. And if we can survive, we can build together.
Some messages from our community imagining Making Worlds
Who Makes Worlds?
Our Black and Brown workers collective is comprised of veteran booksellers and movement organizers. We bring decades of experience in bookselling, community-run small business, in cooperatives, independent publishing, organizing, event and cultural programming, storytelling, education and scholarship, radio hosting, and movement building in Philadelphia, in the metropolitan region, in the wider United States, and internationally.
How
We are committed to building an inclusive and inspiring space for all who embody and share the principles of a better world won through grassroots, community-powered movement building.
We are a space that centers intersectional, disability, trans, gender nonconforming, and sex-worker affirming feminisms and supports liberatory social movements. We aim to connect neighborhoods and communities facing displacement, deportation, and incarceration due to the interconnected settler colonial forces of gentrification, ethnic cleansing, borders, prisons, neoliberalism, genocide, and fascism, and within a world imperiled by capitalist-driven climate catastrophe.
We power the project through non-hierarchy, care, cooperation, collective-based decision making, healing, and transformative justice. All members of our community are welcome and encouraged to shape our collection and programming.
We envision an oppression-free Philadelphia that builds on both our histories and present capacities to organize towards a conception of a just city and to navigate a climate-changed future. We believe that building the muscles of abolition, reparations, healing, and decolonization can position the communities of West Philadelphia and the city around us to challenge oppression and participate in creating a society which is equitable, cooperative, and can thrive in a postcapitalist and deeply changed ecological and political landscape.
Why We're Making Worlds
In a city and a world so shook by a global pandemic, work and housing vulnerability, state and vigilante violence, anti-Blackness, trans- and xenophobia, a deepening economic crisis amidst an ongoing climate crisis. How we are able to understand the reality of our situation and come together now and in the coming years as Philadelphians will decide what happens to our beloved city and the world-at-large. The choice is ours: either we disintegrate and perish in a time of rising fascism or we collectively and consciously break free from the oppressive catastrophes that surround us with love, mutual care, and shared purpose.
There is wisdom in a community that learns and affirms the histories and futures imagined and made by Black, Brown, and Indigenous traditions of liberation.
The cornerstones of this future are strong, cohesive, self-determined neighborhoods built on a just and radical re-imagination of how we relate to each other and our natural and cultural worlds. We need spaces in every neighborhood where dignified people gather their resolve to organize, where healing and belonging are felt and lived, where liberatory imagination and action are innovated, and where mutual care networks and capabilities thrive. Making Worlds is a determined step in that direction.
Join us. . .
We are MAKING WORLDS without prisons
We are MAKING WORLDS without police
We are MAKING WORLDS without borders
We are MAKING WORLDS without war
We are MAKING WORLDS without displacement
We are MAKING WORLDS without colonialism
We are MAKING WORLDS without white supremacy
We are MAKING WORLDS without toxic masculinity
We are MAKING WORLDS without transphobia
We are MAKING WORLDS with restorative justice
We are MAKING WORLDS with reparations
We are MAKING WORLDS with commons
We are MAKING WORLDS with autonomy and self-determination
We are MAKING WORLDS with freedom to move and freedom to stay
We are MAKING WORLDS with healing and well-being
We are MAKING WORLDS with dignity
We are MAKING WORLDS with mutual aid and solidarity
We are MAKING WORLDS with all bodies
We are MAKING WORLDS together.
To join us in our work or to let us know if you would like to be included in our email list to receive updates on Making Worlds’ progress, drop us a line at [email redacted].
Collective Survival Pending Abolition
Making Worlds is a nonprofit cooperative bookstore and social center for collective freedom. We aim to build abolitionist and climate-adapted autonomy and ecological self-determination, defend against displacement and gentrification, and bring community together with the affirmation of worlds imagined and made by Black, Brown, and Indigenous traditions of liberation.
As many of supporters in our community know, we opened our doors on February 14, 2020 with enormous heart and hope and optimism about the future. We had to close our storefront on March 15, 2020 due to the pandemic. After months and months of hard work planning and building this project, we were open for exactly 30 days.
This fundraiser is a call to help us open up again. Six months into the pandemic, one of the hardest obstacles in our way is paying off our credit card bill, which ballooned to $18,425.13 (with fees and interest compounding) in the weeks before we opened when we were tightest on funds and had no additional access to money to open, but were so close to opening!
Please consider helping us wipe out this debt so we can stop digging ourselves out of a debt trap it will take forever to escape!
If we can pay this bill off, we can open—and if we can open, we can survive. And if we can survive, we can build together.
Some messages from our community imagining Making Worlds
Who Makes Worlds?
Our Black and Brown workers collective is comprised of veteran booksellers and movement organizers. We bring decades of experience in bookselling, community-run small business, in cooperatives, independent publishing, organizing, event and cultural programming, storytelling, education and scholarship, radio hosting, and movement building in Philadelphia, in the metropolitan region, in the wider United States, and internationally.
How
We are committed to building an inclusive and inspiring space for all who embody and share the principles of a better world won through grassroots, community-powered movement building.
We are a space that centers intersectional, disability, trans, gender nonconforming, and sex-worker affirming feminisms and supports liberatory social movements. We aim to connect neighborhoods and communities facing displacement, deportation, and incarceration due to the interconnected settler colonial forces of gentrification, ethnic cleansing, borders, prisons, neoliberalism, genocide, and fascism, and within a world imperiled by capitalist-driven climate catastrophe.
We power the project through non-hierarchy, care, cooperation, collective-based decision making, healing, and transformative justice. All members of our community are welcome and encouraged to shape our collection and programming.
We envision an oppression-free Philadelphia that builds on both our histories and present capacities to organize towards a conception of a just city and to navigate a climate-changed future. We believe that building the muscles of abolition, reparations, healing, and decolonization can position the communities of West Philadelphia and the city around us to challenge oppression and participate in creating a society which is equitable, cooperative, and can thrive in a postcapitalist and deeply changed ecological and political landscape.
Why We're Making Worlds
In a city and a world so shook by a global pandemic, work and housing vulnerability, state and vigilante violence, anti-Blackness, trans- and xenophobia, a deepening economic crisis amidst an ongoing climate crisis. How we are able to understand the reality of our situation and come together now and in the coming years as Philadelphians will decide what happens to our beloved city and the world-at-large. The choice is ours: either we disintegrate and perish in a time of rising fascism or we collectively and consciously break free from the oppressive catastrophes that surround us with love, mutual care, and shared purpose.
There is wisdom in a community that learns and affirms the histories and futures imagined and made by Black, Brown, and Indigenous traditions of liberation.
The cornerstones of this future are strong, cohesive, self-determined neighborhoods built on a just and radical re-imagination of how we relate to each other and our natural and cultural worlds. We need spaces in every neighborhood where dignified people gather their resolve to organize, where healing and belonging are felt and lived, where liberatory imagination and action are innovated, and where mutual care networks and capabilities thrive. Making Worlds is a determined step in that direction.
Join us. . .
We are MAKING WORLDS without prisons
We are MAKING WORLDS without police
We are MAKING WORLDS without borders
We are MAKING WORLDS without war
We are MAKING WORLDS without displacement
We are MAKING WORLDS without colonialism
We are MAKING WORLDS without white supremacy
We are MAKING WORLDS without toxic masculinity
We are MAKING WORLDS without transphobia
We are MAKING WORLDS with restorative justice
We are MAKING WORLDS with reparations
We are MAKING WORLDS with commons
We are MAKING WORLDS with autonomy and self-determination
We are MAKING WORLDS with freedom to move and freedom to stay
We are MAKING WORLDS with healing and well-being
We are MAKING WORLDS with dignity
We are MAKING WORLDS with mutual aid and solidarity
We are MAKING WORLDS with all bodies
We are MAKING WORLDS together.
To join us in our work or to let us know if you would like to be included in our email list to receive updates on Making Worlds’ progress, drop us a line at [email redacted].
Fundraising team: Making Worlds Books & Social Center (3)
Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center
Organizer
Philadelphia, PA
Malav Kanuga
Team member
Nicki Kattoura
Team member