Watch: Solstice Gala 2023!
The Gayla livestream has been edited and uploaded to youtube, and is now available if you missed it (or want to relive it!). If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our youtube channel and click the bell to be notified when we go live or post a new video! Chapter markers and links to all the performers are in the video description.
News & Notes from Nat, events, & 2 Day Splinter Gayla Dec 20 & 21!
Beloveds members and supporters, If you’d like to skip my missives, please scroll down to read about upcoming offerings, including Splinter Collective’s 2 day Gala celebration on 12/20 and 12/21 and more! In person and virtual options! Communication. It’s a puzzle. I recently saw a beloved in Chicago. As we were catching up, I realized that they weren’t aware of Splinter or anything else that has been going on with my life for the last few years. I also realize ...
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, ...
A note from our Founder
Hello! Nat (Natalie Brewster Nguyen) here, founder and ED of Splinter Collective. This year has been expansive to say the least. What I put in my dreaming-of-what’s-possible box in terms of funding, we managed to achieve already, in just 5 months. It’s amazing, and I’m so grateful to our sponsors, donors, grantors, and everyone who has believed in our vision. I also want to shout out the most incredible team of co-creators who are building this organization and vision with ...