Welcome
I'm Sarah Jessie Tucker, author of Life Café. I'm a trauma survivor and survivor of suicide losses. I was born Treaty No. 13 People and grew up in Scarborough, Ontario. I'm a trained law clerk and grant professional who founded SJT Writing. However, when I was a child, my dream wasn't to be a proposal writer; my dream was to be a poet and creative writer (I'll tell you that story in a future post).
I started my business in 2021, and it's been the most challenging yet satisfying experience of my life. I write grants for non-profits, charities and artists. This year, I vowed that I would treat my creative practice with the kind of care I take with my clients. Starting a business took up all my time, and my creative practice took a backseat. Money got really tight and took me back to my teenage years when I left home at 15 and struggled to pay rent at the age of 17. My exhaustion made my creative practice far from reach, but when I spotted another grant writing training I was interested in, I made a promise that I would focus on my own project and no one else's.
At the beginning of the year, I took a virtual 6-week grant writing intensive where we worked in a small cohort writing a grant application to the Canada Council for the Arts. Class was on Tuesday nights and involved weekly writing assignments and critiquing half the cohort's writing assignments. Intense was definitely the right wording. Classes typically ran over the 3-hour mark with only a small break. It was too much for my trauma recovered system, and I was utterly exhausted after most classes. Halfway through the program, it occurred to me why artists hate grant writing so much. Grant writing is about being in your head and analyzing with only a little bit of support from your heart to weave together a compelling grant application. All I want is to be in my heart, creating.
All I want is time to focus on writing, and I have never been able to afford it because I've been in survival mode since leaving home at a very young age. I learned so much from the grant writing intensive, and I'm grateful, but I was taxed from the experience. Applying for grants is a numbers game. There's no guarantee, and I didn't want to wait around for some arts council to deem me worthy to be in their circle finally. How can I start my project today while raising money to fund my dreams? When I thought about it, a subscription blog seemed like the obvious choice for my misfit soul.
My blog name was born from the name of a grief group meet-up called Death Café. I have a lot of experience with suicide loss and have struggled in the past with ideation. I thought, if I started a group to help survivors of suicide loss, what would I name this group? Life Café was born. Life is short and precious, but also painful if you survived childhood abuse like I have. I've been on a healing journey for over 12 years now, and I'm finally living by choice, not by chance. Life Café is about promoting life, healing, and creative social entrepreneurship.
I became a Cultivating Safe Spaces facilitator in 2022 (more on this in future posts), and it has slowly changed my language from me saying I'm on a healing journey to saying I'm practicing understanding self. As a settler with a complex heritage from Toronto, Newfoundland, England, Ireland and Scotland, I acknowledge I'm on Indigenous land. When I got to a certain point in my healing, I started to recognize that I have a responsibility to Truth & Reconciliation and learning to live in reciprocity with the Indigenous land that has birthed me. Life Café is my commitment to truth-telling and the gifts that Elaine Alec's Cultivating Safe Spaces' framework has given me.
As a trauma-aware Grant Professional, I don't want you to go through an intense process to achieve a polished, fundable proposal. There's an unspoken rule in grant writing that you have to pay your dues through an excruciating process that attempts to suck your soul to the point of giving up, just so you can eventually be awarded a grant. There has to be a different way. Since learning about Cultivating Safe Spaces, I've found a different way. I've slowly adopted this decolonized framework in every area of my business and life, and I have a responsibility to share.
Through my publication, Life Café, I'll share my knowledge of grant writing for artists, fund development for non-profits, and charity proposal writing. We can't always afford a grant writer, so I want to share my knowledge in an affordable, reciprocal way. I will share stories about my healing and unlearning the colonized mindset. Along the way I will share my writing and publishing journey. In addition, I strive to become a social entrepreneur, so I will share my knowledge about starting and running a social enterprise business.
Every quarter, I will offer a workshop, complete with an opening circle, workshop component, and closing circle. When you pay for a yearly subscription, you'll receive a free ticket to our quarterly offerings. I deeply appreciate your support, and every step of the way, subscribers will have opportunities to submit questions for future articles where we can benefit collectively and learn in community.
