Late Spring Musings
Comrades, Co-Conspirators, Cuddlies, We’ve had a packed spring event season starting with the annual Cover Band Show and All Black Everything in February, along with dance parties, poetry readings, and workshops, all on top of our regularly scheduled programming. We want to give a huge thank you and shout out to everyone who comes to our events and supports the work we do at Estevan Park. We’ve been held so well by our community’s support this spring. We’re also acknowledging ...
Estevan Park Project
Last fall, we submitted a proposal to the city of Tucson to provide and manage services at Estevan Park, where there has been an encampment for many years. The City’s MO has been sending police to regularly sweep the camp and evict the people who live there. There are bathrooms at the park, which have rarely been unlocked and stocked for use by the residents there. The city sites safety as their grounds to restrict access to the bathrooms. Over ...
February Newsletter
Dear friends, relatives, and accomplices, How are you? It’s been a minute. It feels like we just wrapped up our Solstice Gala, and we’re already launching full throttle into a packed spring event season. With all our projects in the works, it’s hard to know where to start. We have so much to share with you all about our partnership at Estevan Park, but that will be next time, because it’s Black History month, and we have a lot to ...
Charging Station- Past and Future
In spring of 2020, as we entered the strange and uncertain months of strict quarantine, only a few months after Natalie Nguyen bought the warehouse that has become Splinter Collective, we made the acquaintance of a few men who lived at the encampment at Estevan Park just north of our home. Though interactions were brief and impersonal due to social distancing, we slowly began to form friendships with a few of those people. During the early days of the covid ...
October Announcements
Dear friends, supporters, and accomplices, I don’t know about you, but for us at Splinter, this summer has been a lot of things- trying, exhausting, transformative, and beautiful. As you know from our last newsletter, we’ve been focusing primarily on reorganizing our internal structure and fine tuning our operations in order to build a solid foundation for our fall season. We’ve had some major staffing changes, including the step down of two amazing and instrumental members of our team, Ronah, ...
July Announcements
We’ve spent the month of June resting and reflecting, imagining what our space will look like in a month, a year, five years. Growth can be uncomfortable, and has been pushing us to level up communication skills, pathways, and even our definitions of community. At Splinter, we firmly believe in pushing back against expectations of constant productivity at the expense of self and community care. If our meetings this month have shown us anything- and they’ve shown us a lot- ...
Summer Update
We’ve had an amazing first year and we’re getting ready to take some time off to restore, reset, and level up the space. For the month of June we’ll be pressing pause on most of our internal events, including Interrupted by Trains, our Art Bazaar, and our monthly karaoke night. We’ll still be booking our space for community events, and channeling energy into future projects. This past year we went from a collection of a few people with a dream, ...