“A Place to Keep the Art Stuff”: Rethinking Homelessness Through the Creative Freedom Act
#CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
“A Place to Keep the Art Stuff”: Rethinking Homelessness Through the Creative Freedom Act
“Many artists would be homeless if they didn’t need a place to keep their art making stuff.”
I’ve said this for years - part joke, part confession. But it’s also a quiet truth. For many of us, the anchor that keeps us tethered to the formal economy, to rent, to four walls, isn’t luxury or status. It’s the physical need for a place to store tools, materials, scraps, works in progress. A place to plug in a hot glue gun or let a canvas dry. In other words: a place for our purpose to live.
What if we extended that logic a little further?
What if, instead of treating homelessness as a failure to “perform” in the marketplace, we reframed it as the absence of a place to work at one’s soul work?
Because here’s another quiet truth: many people who fall through the cracks of modern society aren’t lazy, dangerous, or unwilling. They’re just people who can’t keep up with a world that’s grown too complicated, too fast, too cruel. People who never got to build a studio around their gifts.
The Sanctuary Studios Initiative
As part of the evolving Creative Freedom Act, I want to propose a bold but simple idea: that everyone has a right to a place for their purpose.
We call it the Sanctuary Studios Initiative.
These would be creative shelter-communities repurposed from the countless underused buildings in cities and towns across the country—old post offices, schools, civic centers—turned into studio-shelters: modest private rooms, shared kitchens, common creative spaces, gardens, and workshops.
You wouldn’t have to “prove” you’re an artist.
You wouldn’t have to jump through bureaucratic hoops.
You wouldn’t be locked into trauma-recycling programs or punished for being unable to navigate paperwork.
You’d be offered a room.
A workshop.
Some dignity.
And time.
What You Might Find There
Maybe you'd spend the first month just sleeping. Fine.
Maybe you’d slowly come into the morning light and remember a story you used to love.
Maybe you'd start scribbling.
Maybe you'd paint.
Or learn to fix bikes.
Or teach someone how to cook.
Or sit quietly and remind someone that life doesn’t always have to make sense right away.
These spaces wouldn’t be rehab centers or shelters in the traditional sense. They’d be interim zones for reinvention.
For recovery of the self.
For the chance to simply be again, surrounded by creative energy and gentle expectation.
Many people who are unhoused once had dreams.
Sanctuary Studios give them a place to put those dreams down without being asked to perform or produce on demand.
Some may go on to become working artists.
Others may simply find their way back to a life that feels worth living.
Both outcomes are sacred.
A Place for the Art Stuff Is a Place for the Soul
Back to that saying:
"Many artists would be homeless if they didn’t need a place to keep their art making stuff."
It’s funny because it’s true - but it’s also tragic.
We’ve built a society where having a purpose is not enough.
You need proof of productivity, financial viability, market value. You have to perform usefulness to systems that forgot how to see worth without price tags.
What if we flipped the premise?
What if we said: if you have something beautiful or broken inside you—something you don’t yet know how to name - that’s reason enough to be sheltered.
Because you carry a spark.
And because society owes sanctuary to those who dream too hard to keep pace with the machinery.
The Sufis speak of a hidden truth:
"I was a hidden treasure; I desired to be known. So I created the worlds so that I might be known [to Myself]."
What if we took that seriously?
What if we regarded each person - especially those who’ve been forgotten, cast out, or labeled disposable - as a hidden treasure trying to come into form?
What if the purpose of society was not to enforce conformity, but to offer each soul enough time, shelter, and beauty to reveal its hidden pattern?
Let the Creative Freedom Act be more than a bill for working artists.
Let it be a lifeline for the soul-work of those who fell through the cracks.
Because maybe they didn’t fall.
Maybe they were pushed.
And maybe - just maybe - some will remind us how to live again.
Myself, I am a studio artist and a citizen. My job and my duty is to start the conversation and seed the imagination. It is up to others in the right places to nurture it into a reality. We all have a part to play. What’s your part? Do it.
Hashtags to use: #CreativeFreedomAct #CultureShiftAct #CreativeSocietyAct
web address: https://www.touchonian.com/s/creative-freedom-act
If this stirred something in you—share it.
And if you have thoughts, ideas, or stories of your own, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
This puts words to something so many quietly feel. A place to create is a lifeline. The Sanctuary Studios idea is deeply humane. It recognizes that dignity, purpose, and the simple act of making something are basic needs. Thank you for reminding us that society’s worth is measured by how it treats the dreamers who don’t fit the mold. I hope more people take up this call to reimagine what shelter really means.
This reminds me of something I had totally forgotten about. When I was substitute teaching here in Sacramento, one of my assignments was to sub for a school that was structured for homeless children and non-English speaking immigrant children. Food and lodging was provided for 6 weeks for the families, after which they had to leave. 6 weeks was the length of typical curriculum units.
All the lesson units were pretty much arts based. The art that the students produced usually took up an entire classroom, and those classrooms were fabulous with the themes the kids worked on together. It was successful for most of the students and they learned English much faster than on the streets, as well as all the other grade appropriate subjects. You could see when their time was about to expire. The kids would start acting out, knowing they were going to have to leave, just as they were starting to do well and make new friends. That was the down side.
I just got to thinking that these kinds of schools could offer an incentive for long term housing as long as the children were in school and doing well. Money is incentive for putting a roof over your head, but giving the children the opportunity to stay in place and learn is more valuable, if providing long-term housing is the reward. For adults and homeless families it could boost self-esteem long enough to pull their lives together and not have the stigma of being homeless, spending less time surviving living on the streets, and more time elevating the necessities of lifestyle skills, maybe culminating in also giving parents the opportunity to eventually buy their own homes at much lower rates, and relaxing "rules" for financing.
Perhaps that would work better than just handing out money to survive on with low outcomes, but working as a family to get the foothold necessary to make it out of the nightmare of homelessness for the parents and kids. I think this would be good for all involved, including the public where it could be demonstrated that EVERYONE is working toward training families how to live life successfully, and not merely survival and monetary handouts while living on the streets; using public money, which would be earmarked for a system of necessary positive outcomes.
I don't know if that program still exists but in my opinion, that was excellent. Enhanced it could be very productive for working together and uplifting families and communities, not just a band-aid fix.
This, to me, would be a more holistic structure than just handing out money from different agencies to keep people alive.
Start with the kids. That is incentive on it's own, now and in the future.
I know this reply is not directly addressing Artists and their Art, but it is addressing it indirectly.