See You in the Future Collective — Sabrina Dorsainvil, George Halfkenny, Melissa Q. Teng, Stephen Walter

Too often described as the region’s “epicenter” of addiction, homelessness, and incarceration, Mass. and Cass is the product of conflicting processes of care and control that have created a hypervisible yet poorly understood crisis. Building on years of lived and work experience, our team aims to reactivate an anchor space, the Engagement Center, with a pop-up community lab. Through arts programming, consistent presence, and a revolving set of curators, we hope the lab will be an energetic space for guests and staff to create beauty, share resources, and come together around storytelling. We believe a space designed around trust and voice at Mass. and Cass can affirm the inherent worth and autonomy of its street-based, unhoused, drug-using, and care-giving communities. It can also be a hopeful space to invite those with different forms of power into a more honest conversation about the future of Mass and Cass and, more broadly, the location of crisis.