Our Story

From a thesis to a storefront

Same Sky Collective began with two graduate students — Lana Fine and Kris Middleton — in the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice program at Thompson Rivers University. Their research focused on the toxic drug crisis, told not through statistics, but through the voices of people living it.

The question that drove the work: what would it look like if the people most excluded from public life — from galleries, from services, from decisions made about them — were given the wall, the microphone, and a fair share?

The answer became a storefront at 417 Tranquille Road. After months of renovations, Same Sky Collective opened in December 2024 as a registered non-profit society — part gallery, part studio, part community living room.

Disrupting who galleries are for

Typical galleries aren't always welcoming to all people — in who they show, who they serve, and what they take. Here, our artists keep 70% of every sale. It makes the budget hard. It also makes the mission real.

The studio honours all voices, creativity, and art forms. Many of our artists have lived or living experience of homelessness, poverty, or the toxic drug crisis. Here, they are not clients or cases. They are artists.

Cultural story mapping

The studio houses a completed creative research project on the toxic drug crisis, told from the perspectives of people with lived and living experience. It uses cultural story mapping — an approach grounded in Indigenous ways of understanding relationship to space and place. The work is proudly displayed throughout the building. Come see it.

Advocacy

We believe services only work when they're designed by and with the people who use them — "nothing about us, without us." We speak up for our neighbours: for shelter, for harm reduction, for dignity. When people experiencing homelessness are blamed for crises they didn't create, we say so publicly.