Joe Charley on Building Sunrises for the Soul

The Good Morning Experience: Black Awakening sounds both powerful and deeply intentional. What inspired this project, and what kind of experience do you hope it creates for those who attend?
Black Awakening was the first installment of The Good Morning Experiences — a trilogy born from a season of deep transition, both personally and culturally. After headlining my Good Morning, Charley national tour in support of my debut EP B.A.M.B.I. in 2024, I returned home sensing the work wasn’t complete. I carried all these stories, emotions, and lessons from the road, and I wanted to root that momentum back into my own community in a way that felt like a homecoming and a rebirth.

Over the past several years — especially through COVID — I watched my communities move through grief, rapid change, and the pressure to return to “normal” without ever being given space to breathe. I wanted to create something that interrupted that cycle.

Black Awakening became an exploration of what it means to rise — emotionally, spiritually, and culturally — after seasons of heaviness. Through music, ritual, and conversation, we created a space where healing didn’t need an institution to be valid; sometimes it just needs rhythm, breath, laughter, and honest presence.

My hope was that everyone who came felt held, seen, and re-centered like they were witnessing their own sunrise.

You’ve described the event as blending music, poetry, and dialogue around healing and cultural resilience. How do you see art as a tool for collective healing and awakening within the Black and Afro-Latino communities?
Art is our first language. Long before there were stages, there were drums, chants, stories, and dances passed from generation to generation. For Black and Afro-Latino communities, art has always been a survival strategy — a way to hold memory, process pain, deepen joy, and imagine new worlds.

I see art as both a mirror and a doorway. It reflects what we’re carrying, and it opens us to what we haven’t yet been able to name. When we gather in creativity, we’re practicing communal care, cultural continuity, and emotional liberation. Creativity becomes infrastructure — not decoration, but a foundation for resilience, remembering, and reimagining.

Your broader platform, WTP, centers on connecting BIPOC artists, storytellers, and innovators. How did that mission begin, and how is it evolving through projects like The Good Morning Experience?
We the Peeples Entertainment (WTP) was born from lived experience before it became a platform. Growing up performing — modeling, dancing, singing, acting — I was often the only, brown-skinned artist in the room. My gifts were nurtured, but my ownership rarely was. I contributed to major stages and international campaigns without owning the work my identity helped shape.

That early solitude shaped me. WTP became my answer: a culturally rooted ecosystem where artists could create, collaborate, and thrive without shrinking themselves.

Through the Good Morning Experiences — Black Awakening, DAYDREAM, and upcoming Twilight Festival — the mission has expanded from visibility to transformation. These aren’t events; they’re ecosystems. They’re spaces where BIPOC creatives, healers, thinkers, families, and everyday people can explore the intersections of culture, mental health, climate, identity, storytelling, and collective joy.

WTP is evolving into community infrastructure — a home for belonging and intentional future-building.

And now, with The Good Morning Suite in 2026, we’re bringing it all together as a feature-length docu-film. Footage from the B.A.M.B.I. recording sessions, the Good Morning, Charley tour, and each Good Morning Experience will be woven into a single cinematic arc — one sunrise carrying viewers from isolation to illumination.

Receiving the Weathering Together grant from Springboard for the Arts is an incredible honor. How does that opportunity intersect with your creative work — especially around themes of climate and community resilience?
The Weathering Together grant arrived at a pivotal moment and affirmed something I was raised to understand: pride in oneself is deeply tied to care for one’s environment. Climate resilience and cultural resilience are interconnected.

While designing DAYDREAM, the second Good Morning Experience, I wanted to expand the Good Morning conversation into environmental healing — something directly linked to community well-being. Through the grant, we hosted an immersive gathering at Urban Ventures and partnered with Cooperative Energy Futures to merge art, food, music, conversation, and environmental education. We also created multimedia storytelling for the upcoming PBS docuseries Mars Can Wait, highlighting sustainability through the lens of everyday community wisdom.

Communities of color have always known what it means to weather storms — politically, emotionally, and environmentally. Our networks, traditions, and survival strategies are forms of climate wisdom. The Weathering Together grant helped us create a space where people could learn and imagine — not through fear, but through creativity, joy, memory, and possibility.

You’ve talked about this season of your life as one of momentum and transformation. Looking ahead, what kind of legacy or impact do you hope your work will have — both artistically and within the communities you serve?
This season feels like a long inhale becoming an exhale — preparation, lived experience, and purpose finally aligning.

I hope my legacy is one of ownership, imagination, and collective uplift. Ultimately: permission.
Permission for Black, Afro-Latino, and queer artists to be expansive.
Permission for communities to rest, dream, and reconnect with their power.

Artistically, I want to be known for storytelling that is vulnerable, brave, and boundary-breaking — creating performances, albums, festivals, and films that center the fullness of Black and Afro-Latino complexity and joy. Culturally, I hope to help build infrastructures of care — places where people can gather in truth, heal in community, and shape futures rooted in dignity.

The final installment of Good Morning Experiences, The Twilight Festival — a seven-day citywide Kwanzaa celebration — reflects that vision. And with the Good Morning Suite film in 2026, we’re shaping a single sunrise story that carries audiences through the transformation of these past years.

If my work reminds people that they matter, that they are not alone, and that their voice carries value, then I’ve done what I came to do.