75% of royalties generated by streaming will be donated to Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a volunteer-run organization in Washington DC that provides legal support, housing, and many other types of support to migrants in DC through solidarity, not charity.

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I spent a lot of time in church as a teenager. Unlike many teens, this was entirely my choice. Through those stained glass windows, under the arched ceiling, within each verse of every hymn, I found a sanctuary.

I left my small homogenous town to go to college in what felt like the biggest city in the world. I was endlessly curious and I met so many people. Many of these new friends were very different than anyone I’d met before. They were wonderful! And I had been taught in my childhood church exactly where some of these people were fated to spend their eternities.

The cognitive dissonance of this experience began the process of my personal religious deconstruction. This spread into learning about the ways individuals are impacted by bigger systems in general.

When buses began arriving to DC from Texas in 2022, the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid (MSMA) Network was born. The governments were at war with each other, so the people stepped in. Housing was arranged, meals were prepared, interpretation was provided.

I don’t pretend to know how to fix the large systemic problem that causes a family to flee their home to a foreign land. Despite having heard many of these stories first-hand in my public school work as a bilingual speech therapist, I don’t pretend to understand what it feels like to arrive in that land. But I do know that if a child is hungry, we feed her.

I live across the street from a church now in an area where many of our lawmakers also live. On Easter Sunday last year, after having recently read in the news that schools and churches were no longer considered sanctuaries, I watched people filter into the church in their finest.

I wondered how many of those people had heard these stories firsthand? I wondered the question that was engraved onto many of my bracelets as a God-fearing teenager - wwjd if he were alive today? What would he say of the cruelties that have been committed in his name?

I suspect the man who fed the masses, visited lepers and instructed us to love our neighbors would’ve been right next to the incredible volunteers at MSMA.

From these wonderings, Sanctuary was born. I don’t have any answers - but I sure as hell have a lot of questions.