#We Are What Community Looks Like

Who We Are:
We are an inter-generational and Black-led mutual aid initiative. None of our organizers are paid for their work.
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Who We Serve + How:
Our recipients are under-resourced Queer, Transgender, Indigenous People Of Color (QTIPOC) living in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, or rural North Carolina. All recipients have been economically impacted by COVID-19, and were fighting to survive systemic racism, queerphobia, and transmisogynoir before the pandemic even hit. Most have never received a stimulus check, and face significant barriers to accessing safety-net services. Our community sends in their Solidarity Pledges once a month, and we send those funds to our recipients. Mostly through Paypal, Venmo and Cashapp. We figure out other ways when folks don't have bank accounts. Funds are given with zero strings attached.

What We've Done So Far:
We've re-distributed over $130,000 to our recipients since the pandemic hit. About $110,000 of that came from our beloved community, including $30k+ from Resource Generation's Triangle Chapter! The rest came in the form of rapid-response grants + fundraisers from LGBTQ+ focused social justice non-profits like the Third Wave Fund, the Equality NC Foundation, Race Forward, The Campaign For Southern Equality, and Southern Vision Alliance. We are grateful to these orgs for funding + supporting autonomous groups like ours!

Updates 7/17/22:
Our Black + gender-non conforming recipients are living under unconscionable conditions. Monthly direct payments help our people avoid being forced into exploitative work + relationships, as well as avoid starvation, exposure, and incarceration.
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We are working hard to provide long-term, reliable support to our existing 10 recipient organizers. Please consider helping make this work more sustainable by signing on to our Solidarity Pledge. Our goal is to continue to provide our recipients with $500+ in survival funds each month, for the foreseeable future..
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Your Solidarity Pledges will always be used to stabilize existing recipient organizers. Other monies raised/contributed through community events/online fundraisers will be set aside for non-recipients in need of emergency funds. In essence, we have started a “General Fund” because we want to be able to show up for more (QTIPOC) community members in economic crisis.

Our Organizers

​Co-founder Dr. Sharon P. Holland is an African-descended queer + gender non-conforming Elder + writer who is also a professor at UNC. She is the President-Elect of the American Studies Association, and is on the Editorial Advisory Team for Appalachian multimedia oral history project Country Queers.

Dr. Holland organized with ACT-UP in the 80’s during the AIDS crisis, and has supported anti-racist and anti-HB2 work here in Chapel Hill. Her approach to community building is inter-sectional and encompasses deep connection to this place and its people, as her grandfather was active in Durham Civil Rights in the early 50's and her mother, a UNC alum (‘61) was a plaintiff in the Blue school desegregation case. She came back to the Triangle to teach and to continue her family’s social justice legacy.

House Of Omni Xatriarch Kristina "Omni" Perry is a stabilized former recipient organizer with ancestral power + community organizing roots here in Orange County.
Ze has stepped up to support Dr. Holland’s vision of uplifting the community beyond direct payments + wealth redistribution. Food justice, joy as resistance, + building systems of mutual care are on their agenda, so stay tuned.

​​At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Holland co-founded the QTIPOC Fund with Bakari Roscoe, a young Black queer activist who organizes around food/housing justice + harm reduction, with a huge affinity toward diverting resources to community members fighting house-lessness and substance use disorder. 

Our silent organizer is white, GNC, + working class, with upper-middle class roots. They have lived experience surviving trafficking + food/housing insecurity as an adrift queer disabled youth. A core belief informs their work: giving folks what they need to survive keeps them safe. 

​Additionally, Houses Holland + Omni queerfamily runs The LGBTQ Pop-up Center Of Carrboro, QueerRide Carrboro, SlugSpace, and Queer Family Market. Our organizers have worked collaboratively with groups like House Of Kanautica, SONG NC, Refund Raleigh, Equality NC, the LGBTQ Center of Durham, Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), UNC QTPOC, NC Harm Reduction Coalition, The UNC LGBTQ Center, North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault, El Centro Hispano, and more.​ 

"In societies across human time
our gender non-conforming people have been
the magic, the religion, the sorcery of cultures.
Straddling this world and other worlds.
Afraid of nothing and no one.
These people we come from
do not understand us
because they know that
​they have no hand in making us.
And that makes us other to them.
So we have to find our people." 
​-Dr. Sharon P Holland-