ThirdSpace Action Lab

ThirdSpace Action Lab is hosting Wellness Wednesday — a one-hour session designed exclusively for women to recharge, reconnect, and prioritize their well-being. Join us for a dedicated hour of wellness in a supportive, community-centered space built for women who are ready to invest in themselves. Space is limited, so registration is required — don't miss your spot! This week is line dancing, taught by RJ Line Dance Premier.

This year, ThirdSpace wants you to confirm and abide by your agency.

Agency looks at your ability to live freely and to make your own choices. We are firmly rooted in our advance of anti-racist community development and the agency of gatherings of people.

Yes, we will have a small slate of events, but our purpose is to highlight and push forward the narrative of our collective community of those doing the catalytic work of change.

The webpage will be launching soon, and in the meantime, we encourage everyone to submit their events to fill up our full June calendar via link in bio.

Walter Mosley has written more than sixty books. "Ghalen: A Romance in Black" might be his finest.
It's the story of one Black family — a scientist, a cook, and the brilliant son they raise together — told with the patience and depth that Mosley always brings to the inner lives of people mainstream fiction tends to skip past. Love in all its forms. Becoming. What you carry from the people you lose.

The book dropped yesterday. Tomorrow, he's sitting down with Black bookstores that are a part of the National Association of Black bookstore nationwide to talk about it, and we're hosting the virtual watch party right here in the Reading Room.

Come through in person on May 28 at 8:30pm ET and watch it with us on 105th. Or pre-order Ghalen now and get a signed copy with custom artwork plus access to the live simulcast from wherever you are.

Cleveland is turning 230! We’re proud to be part of One Cleveland, a
citywide civic pride movement celebrating the people, places, stories, and
history that connect us all.
From our neighborhoods to our shared experiences, celebrates what
makes us Cleveland. Visit cpl.org/onecle to learn more.

We were honored to be the bookseller at & 's address from civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson in support of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival. Stevenson's latest writing, a foreward contribution to the photobook "The Legacy Sites," sets the brevity for what the reader is to experience in the following pages.

For those who missed out, signed copies are still available online and in our bookstore, .

We are the sun. And Jamaica Gilmer has the lens to prove it.

This isn't your typical lecture — it's an invitation to slow down, breathe, and practice. Join us as visual artist and healer Jamaica Gilmer introduces her Peace Practice, a framework for cultivating rest, intention, and inner freedom as acts of resistance. This lecture features portrait sharing, honoring the faces and stories at the heart of this work. Guests are invited to move through three hands-on stations, reflecting with Peace Practice cards, settling into coloring, and rolling beeswax candles, creating space for the kind of quiet, communal healing that doesn't always get a room of its own. Come as you are, leave a little lighter.

RSVP: https://bit.ly/FL_Peace

The work got its flowers.

ThirdSpace Action Lab just received a Merit Award in Planning from AIA New York — recognized alongside Sasaki, WSP, and our partners for Repairing the Innerbelt: A Playbook for Highway Removal in Post-Industrial Cities.

The Akron Innerbelt was not a neutral infrastructure decision. It was urban renewal — which is a polite name for the demolition of Black neighborhoods through eminent domain. Hundreds of homes, businesses, and churches. Communities that did not consent and were not compensated fairly. A mile-long wound dressed up as progress.
The playbook we helped build is about what comes next when a city is finally ready to reckon with that. Not just redevelopment — repair. The kind that starts with the people who were displaced and works outward from there.

This recognition belongs to the community members who showed up, told the truth about what was lost, and trusted us to hold it in the work.

We're just getting started.

We are the sun. And Jamaica Gilmer has the lens to prove it.

Photographer, artist, and curator Jamaica Gilmer — founder of The Beautiful Project and the mind behind Elders of the West End — is coming to Cleveland for We Are The Sun: A Photographic Tribute to Black Community, a project that centers the stories, wisdom, and faces of Black people who have given this city its soul. The work already happening on the page says everything: a 95-year-old who walked 519 miles in the footsteps of freedom seekers. An 83-year-old who remembers when the whole neighborhood raised every child on the block. A 25-year-old teacher who has her students say out loud every day: "I am beautiful, I am special, I am more than enough, and there will never be another me."

This is not documentation. This is a tribute.

Two ways to be part of it on Saturday, May 23 at the ThirdSpace Reading Room:

10AM — Photo Sessions: If you are a Black Clevelander with a story to tell and a face that carries it, we want you in this project. Sign up to be photographed by Jamaica Gilmer. The link to reserve your session is in our bio.

4PM — Freedom Lecture: Peace Practice: Jamaica joins us for a conversation on community, storytelling, and what it means to build sacred archives of Black possibility.

Both events are at 1464 E. 105th St., Cleveland, OH.
Your story belongs in this project. Register at the link in our bio.

Future Kitchens: Food, Land, and Collective Care is a cross-sector public program presented by ThirdSpace Action Lab x moCa Cleveland. The evening brings together artists, growers, organizers, and neighbors to explore food justice, urban agriculture, and ecological interdependence through the lens of contemporary art and community practice.

The program features the community-rooted work of Shalom & Tranquility Garden Network, led by Ebonie Randle and Hood Honey, led by Trey Williams, highlighting their ongoing contributions to land stewardship, pollinator ecosystems, and food sovereignty.

Throughout the evening, moCa is activated as a civic and sensory environment where foodways, land-based knowledge, and cultural practice are shared, experienced, and collectively reimagined.

RSVP Here: https://lnkd.in/g8PNx78g

Tomorrow, hosts Robert Edwards as he talks Black history and his determination to chronicle The Great Migration by restoring and creating a living museum within a 1940s style Greyhound bus to preserve that feeling of traveling to new worlds. Robert Edwards will be in conversation with . Grab your tickets via link in bio.