We’re in the home stretch. 2024 is almost over, and sadly our future is still unclear. To catch up folks that have not heard the news, Wise Fool is being evicted from the studio space on Siler Road that we have called home for the last 8+ years so our neighboring tenant could assume the entire building. Our other neighbor, Renegade Floral, is being evicted as well.

We were given less than a year to find a new home – a seemingly impossible task, when our last studio move from Agua Fria in 2015 took us 2-3 years of careful planning. On top of this already difficult situation, financial support for our organization – and nonprofits in general – has been at an all-time low.

Our staff have weathered layoffs, reductions in hours, and a seemingly insurmountable list of tasks as we balance our “normal” responsibilities with strategizing how to dismantle our studio home-base as a small team of four. This has severely impacted our project capacity, as you can imagine. It has been a struggle to find a new building suitable for our needs – affordable warehouses with 20′ high ceilings are hard to come by in this town! And with the timeline we were given due to our eviction, is has proven to indeed be an impossible task.

Currently, we have run short on leads and have not been able to secure a new home. But we are more than our struggles. And more than anything, we are resilient. We can see that our next steps require a pivot.

We are now turning our focus from finding a new studio space, to drafting a plan for how Wise Fool can continue on as an organization without a physical home. We consider our award-winning youth programs such a vital part of Santa Fe’s culture, and cannot imagine the next generation of children coming of age without important safe spaces to explore self expression and creativity.

This is where you come in. Wise Fool is built upon the foundation of community support. If you want to see us continue on into 2025, we need your immediate aid and are running out of time.