About Us

WHO WE ARE 

Kanal is a Transfeminist Queer Wagenplatz, a registered charitable Association for Education and Empowerment, located in Berlin, Neukölln. We are a diverse and international group of people coming from different life experiences and backgrounds as marginalized people. We are migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and volunteers from working class families. As a community space, we offer residence and project space by and for women, queer, lesbian, trans and intersex people to live here, run workshops, and / or realise projects. The majority of us are Black, Indigenous People of Color (PoC) migrants


WHAT WE DO 

Kanal is an empowerment space for qtbpoc ** and accomplices to learn together. Our work is focused primarily in promoting self-determination, helping people to help themselves, to have access to the tools necessary for learning practical skills in a non-judgemental and non-competitive environment. We are a self-organized space in which different projects take place on a solidarity basis. In our open workshops we share our skills, we learn together and implement them in our personal small-scale projects, such as as building and maintaining our bicycles or making wooden crafts, well as in our construction projects building dedicated structures for community use such as the cinema, or in wagon construction for the resident volunteers.

Through this collaborative learning process we aim to increase and share our knowledge and skills, at the same time we work on a horizontal basis without hierarchies, so that we have control over our own creative will and our projects. Everyone is equally responsible for the project.
By empowering people in our community, we want to initiate social change that will improve the lives of historically marginalized people and promote social peace in the long term.  It is our goal to foster a sustainable space of growth for our community, both in terms of self-sufficiency and ecological impact.
Kanal is additionally a home to a biodiverse microcosm, a tiny new forest that we live in symbiosis with, alongside black squirrels, foxes, hedgehogs, bats, woodpeckers and more- all in the middle of the city of Berlin!


WHERE WE’RE GOING

Kanal has had a very long and complex history, evolving at every turn.
It is a mutable space with a lot of room for growth and reflection. After a long time fighting for the right to stay in this land, we are finally able to look to our future and think of ways in which we can give back.
Because of this, we’re constantly looking for friends and volunteers willing to commit to develop the project further. This is no particular group or individual’s legacy, but rather a space born out of the needs of the communities that need it most.

There are many things we would like to make happen here in our near future! Many proposals have been made which, we’re working on getting funded and started– some ideas are old and some are new. These include new workshop spaces for sewing and screen printing, a dedicated forge for metal-crafts, a community produce garden, and a queer/trans sauna wagon!

If you are interested in helping us achieve these dreams for our community, or have a proposal that you would like to pitch, please get in touch! Additionally, we’re always interested in collaborating with other groups and organizations, locally or internationally.