LaSaia Wade is building a home for the South Side’s trans and gender non-conforming community, where everyone can be their authentic self.
By Justin Agrelo
“Healing is a place where you see yourself when you walk in,” says LaSaia Wade, founder and executive director of Brave Space Alliance. (Photo: Christopher Thoughtpoet Brown)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
LaSaia Wade misses people. She tells me this in the sunny lounge of Brave Space Alliance’s new Hyde Park office in early September.
“Before COVID, it was beautiful,” says Wade, cofounder and executive director of the city’s first Black- and trans-led community center. Brave Space Alliance hosts a food and clothing pantry, identity-based support groups, community organizing training and a job board—everything is now virtual, except the pantry. “Everybody was able to come in and eat and talk about the programs. The girls, boys, baddies, everyone in between. I miss that. I want that back in the space soon.”
As an Afro-Puerto Rican Indigenous trans woman from the far South Side, Wade remembers the “black holes” in LGBTQ services across the city in her younger years. Far too often there were no queer or trans Black people deciding how to serve queer and trans Black people. “Most of the time we are not in positions of power,” Wade explains. “We know our own narratives more than anyone.”
She founded Brave Space Alliance in 2017 with only two people. The organization has since grown to include 10 full-time staff members, who are all trans or non-binary, over 600 volunteers and the new office—though they moved in last fall on a temporary lease, they are now owners thanks to recent donations. Wade says their ability to buy the space is huge.
“Trans people have always been displaced at alarming rates,” she explains, “even in other organizations or collectives... It feels good to always have a place to call home.”
Save for the lounge area, the center is pretty bare. But what it lacks in decor, it makes up for in being a welcoming environment, free of judgment and filled with care. “Healing in this space means you can come in and be your authentic self,” Wade says, “as whatever you want to call yourself: sex worker, entertainer, prostitute, an LGBTQ person on any level, and get what you need.”
Wade says she asked folks, “What does it look like to be free?” and used those responses to inform everything from the organization’s hiring to its programming.
“If we say we're from the community then you're going to see the community when you walk into this space,” she says. “You're not only going to see how we give to our community, but also... how we heal from what generations of trans people have not been able to heal from.”
When the city shut down in March, Wade says Brave Space Alliance was one of the first organizations on the streets providing food to residents who suddenly couldn’t afford their next meal. Since then, she estimates they’ve been able to feed more than 100,000 people through its food pickup and delivery services.
Early into the pandemic, a resident called into the Illinois AIDS/HIV and STD hotline and shared that if not for Brave Space Alliance’s food delivery program, they would not have been able to eat. When Wade caught wind of the story, she broke down. “We served over 100,000 people… who else felt that way?” Wade explains. “Who else could have been on the brink of not having food or their children starving?”
That experience underscores Wade’s approach to healing: It doesn’t have to be some grand project or years in a therapist's office. It can be as simple as having a full stomach or your bills paid so that you can live, at least momentarily, free from worry.
“Healing is a place where you see yourself when you walk in,” Wade says. A place much like the one she’s created.
Justin Agrelo (he/him) is a queer, Puerto Rican journalist from Chicago’s Northwest side. He is a writer and storyteller working to make space for marginalized folks in predominating narratives by centering voices that are often overlooked by traditional media.
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