Making Space
Despite the increasingly somber political reality outside its doors, the lobby of the Brave Space Alliance in Chicago is all smiles as Sharmaine Canady holds court. Waiting for a package of food from BSA’s community pantry during a visit in March, she regales staff and volunteers about her plans to cook chicken noodle soup with turmeric to share with her dog that afternoon.
The organization has been critical for Canady during a difficult time. She recently moved to Chicago from the Bay Area, after her brother died of COVID-19. Her father died shortly after her closest sibling. Then, one of her dogs passed away. “It’s been such a sad and hard time, and it’s getting crazy in this country,” she says with tears in her eyes. A BSA staff member brings out a grocery bag full of vegetables and chicken broth. She offers her thanks, then tells me that she has plans to teach a free jewelry-making course for people, like her, served by Brave Space Alliance. “They’ve been so good to me,” she says. “It would be my small way of giving back.”
The Black, trans-led organization was founded in 2017 with the mission to establish and protect “four pillars of dignity” for a locally underserved LGBTQ+ population: health, housing, food, and identity. Though it receives modest grant money from the city of Chicago and state of Illinois, the nonprofit relies mainly on donations. And while it has a focus on the needs of LGBTQ+ people, particularly those of color, its services and programs are available to everyone. The organization’s Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side is generally liberal and welcoming. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is only a few blocks away, and nearby the Obama Presidential Center is under construction. In 2023, the Chicago city council led the United States for LGBTQ+ membership.
But beyond tolerant local politics, it is difficult to escape the terror campaign leveled at the trans and queer community by the Trump Administration, state governments, and influential Christian nationalist networks. State gender-affirming care bans, transgender school sports bans, library censorship of LGBTQ+ books, and even the removal of state civil rights protections have elevated a nationwide atmosphere of repression, persecution, and attack. Enter groups like Brave Space Alliance.
It was a fusion of political outrage over recrudescent rightwing paranoia, and hard-won humanitarian compassion that brought BSA Chief Executive Officer Channyn Lynne Parker to her role in 2023. A former social worker, Parker had also provided health care services to LGBTQ+ youth, and counseling to LGBTQ+ inmates in the Cook County Department of Corrections.
By working with incarcerated folks, Parker says she “lost the linear view of what justice looks like,” developing an understanding that there is a “kind of injustice so systemic and cultural that it cannot be packaged.”
“What I saw working in the jail was that there were historical-generational harms that they experienced, not only family-wise, but community-wise, and those harms ran so deep that they weren’t even able to see that they were harmed,” she says. “So, that’s what led me to this work. After working in the jail, and after working in other social service nonprofits, I saw that there was still something missing, and that’s what we call, in social work, the ‘social determinants of health.’ ”
Parker led me through the BSA offices, explaining in each room how the organization continually labors to construct the four pillars of dignity for anyone who walks through their doors.
Our first stop was at the community pantry, a section of the building stocked with food products ranging from ramen noodles to fresh fruits and greens. Parker explained that they need to have a variety of nonperishable and perishable items, accommodating a variety of preparation and storage methods, because their clients include people with stoves and refrigerators as well as the unhoused.
For a number of those it serves experiencing homelessness, BSA offers up to eighteen months of temporary housing. According to Advocates for Trans Equality, one in five transgender people will at some point be unhoused, and up to 40 percent of the nation’s 4.2 million unhoused youth are LGBTQ+. Those given housing stay in one of the apartment units at the Jasmine Alexander Housing Building, while BSA partners with case workers and housing managers to help the residents “break the cycle of homelessness.” The housing initiative not only provides a temporary residence, but also offers workforce development, financial literacy workshops, and job interview preparation.
Parker explains that the organization’s larger goals often collide with the harsh realities that have limited not only their population’s circumstances, but also their mentality. “One of the challenges,” she says, “is that, with understandable reason, those that we serve have a ‘can I just get through the day’ mindset.” But a focus on daily survival can inhibit the ambition to take advantage of résumé building and career training.
Much of the survival mentality, says Parker, revolves around health concerns, and the myriad obstacles that accompany health care inequities. Brave Space Alliance helps to fill the gap by contracting with medical doctors to provide blood pressure screenings, STD testing, and general checkups. The organization also keeps Narcan—the medication that reverses opioid overdose—on site, free of charge. A few steps away from the medical examination room is the office of a licensed clinical professional counselor, Nikiya Pruitt. She provides wellness checks for those in need, and then recommends more thorough mental health treatment with trusted facilities and professionals.
Pruitt explains that her wellness checks demonstrate that mental health can improve the lives of the people she meets. Most of them have endured only hardship from America’s underfunded mental health system. Brave Space Alliance aspires to show them that there is a better alternative.
Parker ended my tour with a stop at the Dignity Suite, a large room where anyone is free to take clothing, wigs, makeup, and fashion accessories. Next to the Dignity Suite is the Empowerment Space, where contracted hair stylists and barbers will provide complementary cuts and styling sessions. Parker tells me that, although she and the staff designed the Dignity Suite with transgender women in mind, it has become a vital resource for Chicago’s growing migrant population. News of the Dignity Suite spread to migrants through word of mouth. Parker is proud that BSA can contribute to yet another vulnerable population’s simple quest for stability, care, and freedom.
As we walked from room to room, I met several volunteers. Whether they were folding clothes and helping a migrant family find jackets in the Dignity Suite, or stocking the food pantry, they all articulated a joyful urge to “give back” to an organization that helped them in their moments of doubt and pain. There is a mutual aid ethic that runs through Brave Space Alliance, uniting the workers and those they serve in a web of community and accountability. Parker calls it a “public safety model.”
“The Black trans community we are designed to serve—but we include everyone,” Parker says. “That will help someone who comes across a trans person in trouble to interrupt violence. It helps someone who may know a trans kid say, ‘I don’t know what you’re going through, but trans people gave me food.’ ”
When I ask her about the storm of hatred, violence, and disenfranchisement bearing down on transgender Americans, Parker, a Black trans woman herself, says, “It feels like a reminder that we can never rest on the laurels of our past successes.”
“It is so easy to be seduced by this idea,” Parker continues, “that justice is a one-way street. If you actually look at the history of this country, every just cause has had to be fought for on a continual basis.”
“We’re seeing white supremacists, Christian theocrats, oligarchs, and I would go so far as to say fascists, saying, ‘Including and empowering Black and brown folks, LGBTQ folks, is not what we prescribed for this country.’ ”
Parker warns that trans people are merely the “first course” in the feast the oligarchs are making of our government. “And as we’ve already seen with Trump and Musk,” she says, “that includes your Medicaid; that includes your Social Security.”
In its rebellion against escalating hatred of LGBTQ+ people, exploitation of the poor, and even fascism, Brave Space Alliance offers an alternative vision of society; one that is oriented around hospitality rather than paranoia, freedom rather than conformity, and equality instead of hierarchy.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” says Sharmaine Canady, gathering her bag of ingredients for the chicken soup she has planned, “when there is a place that every time you leave, you’re smiling?”