Our Story

Our Story ~

In 2020, renowned musician and educator esperanza spalding—in collaboration with Portland’s BIPoC artistic community—founded Prismid Sanctuary to respond to the profound need and prayer for a nourishing place for creative practice and rest.

In 2021, the community answered that prayer through a successful crowdfunding campaign, which made it possible to acquire a ¾-acre property with a farmhouse in a historically Black and Indigenous neighborhood in North Portland. Since then, BIPoC artists and cultural workers have been welcomed at Prismid to participate in free cultural, ecological, and wellness programs.

In 2024, Mick Rose joined Prismid in the role of Co-Director, bringing over 18 years experience as an Indigenous community cultural worker, advocate and artist working in Native non-Profits at the intersection of land stewardship, youth advocacy, public health, and cultural arts in Portland.

Today, with a dedicated 13-member team, the Sanctuary continues to expand its capacity to serve our communities.

In 2022, Prismid launched a community-led design process to rebuild and expand the Sanctuary. In partnership with Adre—the first Black-femme–owned development company in the country— and a femme-led architecture team from Allied Works, the designs were completed in 2025. The community-visioned rebuild will feature a climate-resilient community hub, a regenerative farm and spaces for artist residencies, workshops, performance, wellness, and creative practice for Portland’s BIPoC artists, cultural workers, and land stewards.

Within three years, Prismid has raised 80% of the total rebuild costs and is on track to secure all remaining funds (debt-free) ahead of its groundbreaking in May, 2026.

Prismid does not subscribe to, prioritize, or discriminate based on any religion.

People & Land

OUR GUIDING PRAYERS

Our Community Partners

OUR TEAM

Press

Prismid Sanctuary will be a permanent, physically and economically accessible hub for arts and culture, food sovereignty, and land restoration, by and for BIPoC community members. We embody the understanding that both Reparations for Black people and Land Back to Indigenous people are central to addressing root causes of systemic harm.

And, there is no blueprint. Along with a commitment for Prismid to be a Land Back site, we are committed to an ongoing process of co-developing, with Black and Indigenous community, what this looks like in practice. Together, we are leaning into the journey of listening, unlearning, and moving in integrity, thoroughness, and transparency as we work to ensure that future generations of Black and Indigenous artists and cultural-workers can inherit space, land, and resources irrevocably dedicated to them, in a future of shared stewardship.

Healing Relationships with People and Land

Our Guiding Prayers

PRISMID’S ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES click + to read more

We respond to the need in our artistic and cultural communities for arts, performance, and gathering spaces that are cultivated by Black and Indigenous vision and values. We prioritize the needs of Black and Indigenous artists & cultural-workers and the tending of our inter-communal relationships in co-liberation with all communities of color.
We honor rest and care as essential to creative and cultural life, not as rewards for productivity. We cultivate space for restoration and imagination because we recognize both as integral to maintaining thriving, creative communities. We hold wellness as collective and relational, rooted in our bodies, our communities, and the land.
We aim to counter systems of scarcity in the abundant environment we co-create with each other. All PRISMID offerings are freely given to those who participate with us.
We invite the medicine of slowing down, moving intentionally with spirit, and engaging with space as a prayer of which all of us are part of. This prayer is to create a field of wellness that allows somatic experiencing of more liberatory ways of being in relationship with place and each other.
We are guided by living in reciprocity with the land as a decolonizing practice. We tend to the needs of the land and our more-than-human relatives as inextricable from the thriving of our human community.
We hold both reparations for Black people and land-back to Indigenous people as central to our world-building, and to a collective present and future we are invested in. We claim our sovereignty by embodying otherwise ways of relating, future-building, and cultivating space, that honor and acknowledge complexity, inter-relation, and distinct differences between our communities’ respective liberation projects & dreams.
We practice and share documentation of our process and work as future-building, with an intention to be of service to a broader network of those who share resonance with our work. We practice modeling self-awareness and reflection as an organization, with an intention to hold space for conflict, repair, harm reduction, and relational healing within our shared communities.