See You In The Future

The SYITF collective formed in 2021 following a big “sweep” of Boston’s largest tent encampment for unhoused people. Our team members came to the project with varied backgrounds including peer support, health justice advocacy, and community co-design.

As stories stigmatizing and disempowering unhoused people made headlines, we looked for creative ways to support members of the tent encampment in sharing their more nuanced and on-the-ground stories.

Since that first sweep, we have hosted community storytelling workshops, researched histories of spatial injustice (‘sweeps’ at scale), created a mural with unhoused folks in Boston, and started a public art & audiovisual story project: Home Is A World.

Through community storytelling and art, See you in the future supports the care infrastructure around the intersection of Melnea Cass Blvd. and Mass. Ave. How might its public spaces not only affirm to all the inherent worth of unhoused and recovery communities, but also work to repair histories of disinvestment and policing? We are slowly working with community members to craft honest stories about the many journeys of and beyond houselessness and active addiction. In bringing different groups together in creative conversation, we hope to both nurture and plant new seeds for a more caring future that is already rooted.

The project has also support and helped design a new outdoor area of the City’s Men’s shelter at Mass and Cass. This features a courtyard with exercise equipment, reading spaces, a game area, lounge chairs, and more.

Here is a short video of us painting the walking circle and other elements of the courtyard, along with the massive mural we painted on the side of the building, co-designed with the community.

A video I made of one day of painting the courtyard track.

Funders have included the the Boston Public Health Commission, the Sasaki Foundation, the Collective Futures Fund (through Tufts University Art Galleries and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts); the Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice grant program from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA); the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center (PKG) at MIT; an the Boston Society for Architecture.

I am a lead partner, designer, researcher, community and peer engagement support, and head of logistics.