WE BUILD OUR COMMUNITY
& CONTENT
With intention.
We design intimate gatherings for those who yearn for community with a focus on self-discovery. Designed as shared authority spaces, our salons catalyze creative exchange, inviting each participant to share the depth and diversity of their lived experience. Our salons are only as powerful as the stories you bring. The role of the creative facilitator is simply to hold space for this emergence.
“To be yourself - unflinchingly - is a gift in this world.”
Anu Mahadev - Editor, Poet & Salon Attendee
Our Mission
We celebrate the creative as the innate fire that is sparked in the everyday act of living. We use the arts and storytelling as powerful vehicles to make sense, construct meaning and respond to the complexity, and volatility of these times.
At Salons for Life, our mission is to empower the individual as the agent of compassionate change. Through self-exploration and guided conversation, the salons are designed to unlock our collective potential for intentional change-making. Our spaces are designed and facilitated to activate curiosity, inclusion and agency.
Pictured: Galen Garwood reading at “Cumulating Story”. Seattle, July 2018. Photo by James Arzente.
Our Impact
We are a volunteer-run organization. As each salon is enriched by those who attend, our impact is only as far-reaching as how we are resourced.
To honor the spirit of financial inclusion, every salon ticket is a sliding scale donation. 90% of each salon’s proceeds go toward paying our artistic facilitators a fair market stipend and to support a charitable/non-profit organization that aligns with our mission.
Our efficiency ratio is high. Roughly,10-15% of donations go toward supporting our operational costs. Two out of our 4-member team volunteer their services pro bono; two are full-time working artists.
44
Salons since April 2018
21 salons held in-person
22 salons held on Zoom
11 cities, 5 states
52+
Creative Facilitators
Theater and performing arts
Music, poetry and spoken word
Visual arts and mixed-media
Embodied writing
Financial Literacy
Mind-body-energy literacy
350+
Community Members
Intentionally built by word of mouth to align with the sanctity of our shared space
Our Salons
The curriculum that inspires much of SFL programming emanates from a single-pointed belief that the individual invested in their creativity, resources and community can be a formidable agent for good. Our facilitators and partners are artists and creative practitioners, financial counselors and mind-body-energy teachers.
The salons have evolved from stand-alone, individual events to curated seasons with a common curatorial thread in which programming and cause are interwoven.
Proceeds for a series is thus, ear-marked to support a series such as the 2020.Life Interrupted Fund or the 2021.India Interrupted Fund.
