Mission

MAKING WORLDS is a new generation bookstore and cultural programming space that brings collective knowledge, skills, and visions into our communities through dialogue, conversations, education, and reflection. We promote learning from each other and the intersecting histories and futures of community organizing and movement building of Indigenous, Black, and Brown people and others resisting oppression worldwide. By distributing literature, other resources, and centering events, we aim to strengthen neighborhood and Philadelphia cohesion for people to care and support each other and make worlds of liberation possible.

Who and how

We are committed to building an inclusive and inspiring space for all who embody and share the principles of a better world won through grassroots, community-powered movement building. 

We are a space that centers intersectional, disability, trans, gender nonconforming, and sex-worker affirming feminisms and supports liberatory social movements. We aim to connect neighborhoods and communities facing displacement, deportation, and incarceration due to the interconnected settler colonial forces of gentrification, ethnic cleansing, borders, prisons, neoliberalism, genocide, and fascism, and within a world imperiled by capitalist-driven climate catastrophe. 

We power the project through non-hierarchy, care, cooperation, collective-based decision making, healing, and transformative justice. All members of our community are welcome and encouraged to shape our collection and programming.

We envision an oppression-free Philadelphia that builds on both our histories and present capacities to organize towards a conception of a just city and to navigate a climate-changed future. We believe that building the muscles of abolition, reparations, healing, and decolonization can position the communities of West Philadelphia and the city around us to challenge oppression and participate in creating a society which is equitable, cooperative, and can thrive in a postcapitalist and deeply changed ecological and political landscape.