Rasheedah Phillips’s Community Futures Lab in Sharswood is underway

Sci-fi author Rasheedah Phillips believes her Afrofuturist philosophies can be used as a salve to heal the wounded.

It’s one half of her fight against racial inequity and injustice.

The other half is her full-time job as a housing attorney with nonprofit Community Legal Services. Phillips’s two-frontwar is now physically melding in Sharswood with the launch of Community Futures Lab, a project that embraces Afrofuturism as a community response to redevelopment and displacement happening in the North Philadelphia neighborhood.

Phillips told PhillyVoice the project aims to document the community’s “stories and memories of Sharswood/Blumberg as it once was and as they would like to see it become.”