Chicago Quilombo Community Center will be a place that centers community first and foremost.

Safe, transformative housing that affirms and heals— without feeling policed or surveilled.

Smiling woman with an afro hairstyle wearing a yellow sweater, sitting at a table with a laptop in a bright, red-walled office space. She is surrounded by colleagues and office supplies, including sticky notes, a tumbler, and a can.

Our
Values

Community Care

We lean into the abolitionist belief that everyone deserves care first. Building connections to meet the social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of one another will set us free much sooner than solution-less critique will. Gwendolyn Brooks said it best— We are each other’s harvest, we are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.

Transparency

Creating the world that we want will have some victories, but many more failures. Let’s embrace a culture of pragmatic, radical transparency that is open and honest about our shortcomings and challenges so that others can learn from our mistakes and achieve more than we thought possible.

Embodiment

It is not enough to dream and talk about what justice, equity and collective liberation looks like. Everyday, we must commit ourselves to embody the practices and live into the world that we long for. Whether it’s about facilitating a meeting or hosting a dinner party, we must intentionally embody practices that prepare us for freedom when it comes.

Restoration

Every day is an opportunity to repair the harms caused to Black communities by systemic racism, under-investment, organized blight, policing, surveillance and militarism. We practice, and learn to practice restorative justice to reach towards our vision of a just and equitable economy by restoring ourselves, one another, and the structures within our community.

Mission & Vision

Chicago Quilombo Community Center will be a place that centers community first and foremost. People will be able to enter the Quilombo and get something that supports and affirms them without feeling policed or surveilled. This support can look like connection to BYP100 and other movement-based organizations that may want to meet in the space, to political education and community events, a warm meal and clean restroom, or even safe room for refuge when fleeing State or patriarchal violence.

BYP100’s Land Committee has given many names to this work-- Freedom House, Liberated Land, Housing Group, and more. We landed on “Quilombo” because it is the true embodiment of what we hope our work will deliver.

Quilombos were lands of resistance that Brazillian maroons escaped to during slavery. Chicago Quilombo’s founder Cosette Ayele first learned what a Quilombo was while living in Cape Town, South Africa and organizing with Black First, Land First in the Khayelitsha township. There was a space in the center of Khayelitsha that looked like an old church where South Africans across political parties met to have debates, make action plans, host events, and care for their bodies (sleep, eat, and have fun, etc.), and they called it a Quilombo. This was a space that met all of their political and physical needs, and though it was a container for rage, it was safe inside a township that would otherwise be a dangerous place for one to rest peacefully among so many other people. Learn more about our story here.