Temple of Two Waters
About Cherry
M. Cherry Omírelekún Rangel (she/they) is the foundress of Temple of Two Waters. For over 16 years Cherry's work as a philanthropic advisor and coach, cultural strategist, and resource mobilizer has helped transform organizations, ecosystems, and fields toward justice. Cherry’s advocacy has ensured that tens of millions of dollars have been redirected to Southerners, BIPOC communities, and TGNC and queer communities.
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Cherry has dedicated her career to liberating wealth and organizing within philanthropy. She has facilitated growth for organizations of color, securing the resources necessary for organizations to scale, increase impact in their communities, and expand their geographic footprint. As an organizer within philanthropy, Cherry's work via advising, consultancy, coaching, research, and facilitation for equity has helped donors and foundation leadership engage in the work of repair and land return, build more just organizations and grantmaking processes, and create courageous spaces that have seeded power shifts within philanthropy.
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A cultural organizer, lifelong dancer, and casual musician born into a musical family from a long line of musicians, Cherry’s work as a thought leader, grantmaker, organizer, and advisor in the fields of arts and culture and cultural philanthropy has been deeply transformative. With Ron Ragin, she led the research process for and authored Freedom Maps: Activating Legacies of Culture, Art, and Organizing in the US South. Initially commissioned by Ford Foundation, the report amplified the links between cultural practice and movements for justice while centering the experiences of artists of color, and changed the course of cultural philanthropy through providing funders with new models, deeper knowledge, and best practices around funding Southern arts and culture. Cherry’s work establishing the Louisiana Worldmakers Program at Foundation for Louisiana created a community driven grantmaking vehicle celebrating Louisiana and Gulf Coast art and culture from an unapologetically decolonial and liberatory framework that centered Black and Indigenous cultural practice and aesthetics while disrupting colonial notions of worth, legibility, and fundable art. Additionally, Cherry’s work an advisor and coach to numerous arts philanthropy CEOs and senior leaders has helped them grow in their understanding of the South, best practices for supporting queer and trans art, and has moved institutions, processes, and leaders closer to the side of justice.
Cherry’s people come from both sides of the Atlantic - on the Western side from Gulf coast communities (Yucatec Maya and lineages from Texas and Louisiana), and on the Eastern side from SWANA peoples (Amazigh with Falastini roots). An organizer since her youth, Cherry has been on the frontlines for intersectional movements for abolition, a free Palestine, migrant justice, racial justice, gender justice, queer and trans liberation, and climate justice for over two decades. Her political homes are Southerners on New Ground, the Southern Movement Assembly, Alternate ROOTS, local movements for a Free Palestine, and kitchen tables, front porches, and queer and melanated dance floors across the US South. Cherry is an alumnus of Smith College, a 2019 Intercultural Leadership Institute fellow, and a Cohort 7 Just Economy Institute fellow. Cherry currently serves as Board Treasurer for Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy and previously served on the boards of LOUD: the New Orleans queer and trans youth theater, and the Weavers Project.
Outside of philanthropy and resource organizing, Cherry is a healing justice practitioner specializing in spiritual care and divination for queer and trans folks and BIPOC and is an initiated priestess of Yemayá in the Lukumí tradition. Cherry’s loves include dancing (raqs el baladi/sharqi + Afro-latinx dance forms); mapping the intertwined dance vocabularies, rhythms, histories, cosmologies, and migrations between the Levant, Africa, and across the Atlantic; curating spaces for queer and trans joy, tending her garden, and spending time with the waters. She lives in her ancestral lands of the Gulf South in Bulbancha/ New Orleans.