The Ara Collective is a queer collective accompanying groups with organisational strengthening and learning, storytelling, and play. We create enabling conditions for the exchange of intergenerational knowledge, skills, and solidarity. We live our values by managing shared resources on a biodiverse and climate-vulnerable island in Asia. Our work with community builders, defenders, and artists focuses on building confidence through strategic support, practical repair, and stewardship of the natural world.
ethos
- Care and solidarity are practical actions.
- Hoarding will not ease suffering.
- Learning can come from anyone and any place.
- We cannot build new worlds without recovering Earth.
- We are responsible for changing our conditions.
- Imagination and play are portals to new timelines.
- Confidence grows better with others.
- The future will hold what we put into it now.
Our lore
The year is 2020. We were ‘founded’ as a group to respond to early pandemic crises. In our first years, we resourced mutual aid, secured housing, and learned skills that could help us help more people. We continue to mask up in public even today.
In 2023, we chose to live within walking distance of each other and invest our resources to test a simple idea: Could we create material stability and healing for our community by sharing everything we had? We began learning by doing in a rural island village. The pain and grief of witnessing genocide inspired us to explore the past so we could better understand how to move in the present.
We move into 2025. We have resourced our own efforts for 2 years while receiving week to month-long visits from people in our network seeking refuge: defenders, organisers, artists, culture workers, and writers. In this time, we experimented with new things and exchanged skills and knowledge across generations. Our collective held our first 5-day convening at the end of the year to digest what we had achieved by sharing all we had.
In 2026, the collective now has full-time co-leads. A participatory evaluation of 2023-2025 showed that our collective created enabling conditions for others to process life events, grow practical and strategic capacity, and build stronger connections to themselves and nature. To follow through on its recommendations, we are readjusting the ways we work in 2026-2028 so we can build new projects with more collaborators in our network.
Ara Collective 