Seeds For Future Memories: Make It Rain $60k!
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Seeds For Future Memories: Make It Rain $60k!
#60KforCentro #MonstritxsALaObra
Right now is a crucial moment for Centro Corona, and we are calling on our people to support us in meeting our fundraising goal of $60,000 by June 20th, the minimum amount needed to cover our rent and the maintenance of our building for the full year. Centro Corona is a community center with a long history since 2011 in Corona, Queens, an intergenerational space that builds from the experience, leadership, and knowledge of working-class and immigrant communities to build a self-determined, collectively-imagined future. In late 2018, unexpectedly we lost our first home base for eight years. In December 2018 we were able to relocate to a lovely new building that is quickly becoming home. Our monthly rent jumped from $1800 a month to $3800, and we need your support to keep our space.
Share our fundraiser and encourage your folks to donate something.
Doesn’t matter the amount, as long as they donate.
☆ YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THIS CAMPAIGN AND OUR WORK BELOW ☆
***
Seeds For Future Memories: Make It Rain $60k!
#60KforCentro #MonstritxsALaObra
Frequencies. Transmissions.
They said “ancestors, listen.”, and they were talking to us. Lighting candles. ‘Taita, Mama, we are your wildest dream’ we heard them say. They spoke with lights. “We have abandoned cages. No borders, the land is back in our hands, breathing. The people are resting, and allowed.”
Affirmations. We are building the path, and bringing them into existence. We feel it, resonating within our bones.
Affirmations. We are sowing them. Into existence.
Frequencies. Transmissions. Messages from a liberated future.
Do you feel these messages too?
We are calling on our people who felt it and have witnessed it. Who witnessed how sharing a space, groundless and precarious, can begin to be enough for conversations to happen, for answers to arrive, and for future memories to foment. If you felt them too, then you have witnessed what can happen when people share a place with purpose. When we are in community with each other, we begin to take things back. We begin to give to each other. We create, lead, and defend. We transform ways of justice and solidarity that can be replicated in more homes, in more neighborhoods. We sow seeds for a liberated future. Our descendents are speaking to us, and we are listening.
If you heard these messages too, we are calling on your help now, to build and sustain Centro Corona for the long haul, autonomously. The work that we do often does not align with funding mandates. This does not concern us. We know that to continue our work, we must rely on the people who love Centro the most, who will feel these transmissions from the future and recognize their own voices, just as they imagined they could be.
Where are they coming from?
We believe they are coming from Corona, many generations from now. The voices of our children’s grandchildren, who are now leading the healing, and sustaining the earth. Perhaps, in this very same building.
The messages are from those who have carried on the work that is already happening today. Our community-led work from the past 8 years: education justice, homework help and la Monstrita Justiciera; gender justice and Soy Yo: Sex Ed Camp for Families; community defense and political theater production “Por la Justicia y los Sorbetes.” Our work that centers key practices and methodologies using arts and culture, popular education, accompaniment, generational leadership development, and creates intergenerational and bilingual spaces for collective decision and art-making. The messages are from futures we have begun growing, from seeds that have already been planted, and we must continue to grow fiercely.
Why are we receiving them now?
This is a crucial moment for Centro. In late 2018, we lost the space that made so much of this work possible. With immense challenge, in December we were able to relocate to a lovely new building that is quickly becoming home. Yet we are met with the realities of how the land is treated as a commodity, as our monthly rent jumped from $1800 a month to $3800, with a $7,200 deposit on our new lease. Our neighborhood is being gentrified, and the people and places that make our community beautiful are being forced out. Today, we are about to sign a lease to remain in our neighborhood, and soon to become an independent organization. However, as we stand right now, we do not have the funds to stay past 3 or 4 months.
At Centro Corona we have made a community where lives of creativity and independence can be lived with joy. For eight years we have confronted the cultural and economic oppression facing working-class and immigrant communities. For eight years we have created safe spaces within our neighborhoods for people to rehearse a liberated future. We have turned violence into art, education, activism and, over time, slowly yet crucially, liberation.
We are made to believe that our future is uncertain, but we heard them speak to us. We feel new frequencies resonating inside us. They are transmissions from our liberated future, sometimes vivid, and sometimes faded, never gone, but never complete, the voices strange, yet familiar. They have never been stronger than they are now. It is up to us to make them true.
How do we honor them?
We accept their messages, and believe they are real. We accept their affirmations that we are working towards freedom, so we start sowing freedom now. Our struggles now bring great opportunity to stabilize Centro, in this place, as a permanent part of our future.
We decided on a raising goal of $60,000, because it is the minimum amount needed for rent and maintenance of our building for the next year. We chose to do this large amount via people’s fundraising, because it will support our agency to continue to create spaces of collective decision-making and action-taking with autonomy. We are committed to maintaining a space that is free and accessible by and for our people.
If you witnessed and believe in this future, help us materialize all this into reality now, by supporting this people-organized campaign. We have taught each other how to get to this point, and have had lots of community advice and support. We hold no degrees on fundraising, but we hold a trust in our people who will helps us get there!
We need your support! Email your friends, make sure they donate something. Anything, as long as they donate. Share widely. Ask us about how to become a monthly sustainer. Ask us about one-time large donations. Share knowledge with us. Support our self-taught processes, all very DIC type of work (Do it in Community). Invest in our future memories!
###
Centro Corona is an intergenerational community center that builds from the experience, leadership, and knowledge of working-class and immigrant communities from Corona and nearby Queens neighborhoods to build a self-determined, collectively-imagined future. We see our community organizing work as a living, ongoing process of building leadership and re-imagining what organizing could be: deeply intimate, emergent, organic and relational organizing grounded in arts and culture. DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) is our fiscal sponsor.
#60KforCentro #MonstritxsALaObra
Right now is a crucial moment for Centro Corona, and we are calling on our people to support us in meeting our fundraising goal of $60,000 by June 20th, the minimum amount needed to cover our rent and the maintenance of our building for the full year. Centro Corona is a community center with a long history since 2011 in Corona, Queens, an intergenerational space that builds from the experience, leadership, and knowledge of working-class and immigrant communities to build a self-determined, collectively-imagined future. In late 2018, unexpectedly we lost our first home base for eight years. In December 2018 we were able to relocate to a lovely new building that is quickly becoming home. Our monthly rent jumped from $1800 a month to $3800, and we need your support to keep our space.
Share our fundraiser and encourage your folks to donate something.
Doesn’t matter the amount, as long as they donate.
☆ YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THIS CAMPAIGN AND OUR WORK BELOW ☆
***
Seeds For Future Memories: Make It Rain $60k!
#60KforCentro #MonstritxsALaObra
Frequencies. Transmissions.
They said “ancestors, listen.”, and they were talking to us. Lighting candles. ‘Taita, Mama, we are your wildest dream’ we heard them say. They spoke with lights. “We have abandoned cages. No borders, the land is back in our hands, breathing. The people are resting, and allowed.”
Affirmations. We are building the path, and bringing them into existence. We feel it, resonating within our bones.
Affirmations. We are sowing them. Into existence.
Frequencies. Transmissions. Messages from a liberated future.
Do you feel these messages too?
We are calling on our people who felt it and have witnessed it. Who witnessed how sharing a space, groundless and precarious, can begin to be enough for conversations to happen, for answers to arrive, and for future memories to foment. If you felt them too, then you have witnessed what can happen when people share a place with purpose. When we are in community with each other, we begin to take things back. We begin to give to each other. We create, lead, and defend. We transform ways of justice and solidarity that can be replicated in more homes, in more neighborhoods. We sow seeds for a liberated future. Our descendents are speaking to us, and we are listening.
If you heard these messages too, we are calling on your help now, to build and sustain Centro Corona for the long haul, autonomously. The work that we do often does not align with funding mandates. This does not concern us. We know that to continue our work, we must rely on the people who love Centro the most, who will feel these transmissions from the future and recognize their own voices, just as they imagined they could be.
Where are they coming from?
We believe they are coming from Corona, many generations from now. The voices of our children’s grandchildren, who are now leading the healing, and sustaining the earth. Perhaps, in this very same building.
The messages are from those who have carried on the work that is already happening today. Our community-led work from the past 8 years: education justice, homework help and la Monstrita Justiciera; gender justice and Soy Yo: Sex Ed Camp for Families; community defense and political theater production “Por la Justicia y los Sorbetes.” Our work that centers key practices and methodologies using arts and culture, popular education, accompaniment, generational leadership development, and creates intergenerational and bilingual spaces for collective decision and art-making. The messages are from futures we have begun growing, from seeds that have already been planted, and we must continue to grow fiercely.
Why are we receiving them now?
This is a crucial moment for Centro. In late 2018, we lost the space that made so much of this work possible. With immense challenge, in December we were able to relocate to a lovely new building that is quickly becoming home. Yet we are met with the realities of how the land is treated as a commodity, as our monthly rent jumped from $1800 a month to $3800, with a $7,200 deposit on our new lease. Our neighborhood is being gentrified, and the people and places that make our community beautiful are being forced out. Today, we are about to sign a lease to remain in our neighborhood, and soon to become an independent organization. However, as we stand right now, we do not have the funds to stay past 3 or 4 months.
At Centro Corona we have made a community where lives of creativity and independence can be lived with joy. For eight years we have confronted the cultural and economic oppression facing working-class and immigrant communities. For eight years we have created safe spaces within our neighborhoods for people to rehearse a liberated future. We have turned violence into art, education, activism and, over time, slowly yet crucially, liberation.
We are made to believe that our future is uncertain, but we heard them speak to us. We feel new frequencies resonating inside us. They are transmissions from our liberated future, sometimes vivid, and sometimes faded, never gone, but never complete, the voices strange, yet familiar. They have never been stronger than they are now. It is up to us to make them true.
How do we honor them?
We accept their messages, and believe they are real. We accept their affirmations that we are working towards freedom, so we start sowing freedom now. Our struggles now bring great opportunity to stabilize Centro, in this place, as a permanent part of our future.
We decided on a raising goal of $60,000, because it is the minimum amount needed for rent and maintenance of our building for the next year. We chose to do this large amount via people’s fundraising, because it will support our agency to continue to create spaces of collective decision-making and action-taking with autonomy. We are committed to maintaining a space that is free and accessible by and for our people.
If you witnessed and believe in this future, help us materialize all this into reality now, by supporting this people-organized campaign. We have taught each other how to get to this point, and have had lots of community advice and support. We hold no degrees on fundraising, but we hold a trust in our people who will helps us get there!
We need your support! Email your friends, make sure they donate something. Anything, as long as they donate. Share widely. Ask us about how to become a monthly sustainer. Ask us about one-time large donations. Share knowledge with us. Support our self-taught processes, all very DIC type of work (Do it in Community). Invest in our future memories!
###
Centro Corona is an intergenerational community center that builds from the experience, leadership, and knowledge of working-class and immigrant communities from Corona and nearby Queens neighborhoods to build a self-determined, collectively-imagined future. We see our community organizing work as a living, ongoing process of building leadership and re-imagining what organizing could be: deeply intimate, emergent, organic and relational organizing grounded in arts and culture. DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) is our fiscal sponsor.
Fundraising team: Ghostfunders (2)
Centro Corona
Organizer
Corona, NY
DRUM - Desis Rising Up and Moving, Inc.
Beneficiary
Hafizah Omar
Team member