Keep Migrant-Led Kitchen Open: Urgent Rent Support Needed

Help Keep Contra Viento Y Marea Open This Winter!

For nearly six years, Contra Viento Y Marea (CVYM) has been a migrant-led mutual aid project in Tijuana, working tirelessly to support some of the most vulnerable populations on the border. We're one of the only groups that is actively serving the community during the holidays. Now, we’re calling on your solidarity to help us cover rent for December, January and February. We need to raise $5,100 USD to ensure we remain open through the critical winter months. Your support ensures we can continue to bring hope and dignity to our community, especially during the coldest part of the year when many are struggling to eat, pay rent and keep warm.

Why Your Help Matters:

We believe in mutual aid not charity. Mutual aid is a method of organizing where ordinary folks come together to meet each other's basic needs by collectively sharing their resources. As a mutual aid project, Contra Viento Y Marea relies on the transnational solidarity of hundreds of people who live on both sides of the border to provide free meals and care to those in our Tijuana community who need it the most. Our community kitchen is more than a space—it’s a lifeline. CVYM supports migrants, refugees, deportees, houseless folks, single mothers, LGBTQ+ individuals, unemployed workers, and street animals. We operate on trust, compassion, and the unwavering belief that everyone deserves access to daily nourishment and lifesaving supplies no matter where they live or who they are. Over the years, through collective direct action and transnational solidarity, we’ve:

Your support is vital for our mutual aid project. To guarantee our collective continues to provide for our community during the winter holidays, our busiest time of the year, we are asking folks to share and or donate funds for our rent. The rent is $1,700.00 USDs (rent is charged in dollars not pesos) per month and it's due by the 4th. We're trying to raise funds for the next 3 months, a total of $5,100.00 USDs to give us time to focus on our work instead of fundraising. The most urgent goal is to make our December rent by the 4th. Every cent counts. Every person who helps us reach our goal is making a tangible difference. 

​​​​​​​We cannot do this without you. Losing our space during the winter would be a disaster. It would be devastating blow to a community already facing extreme violence and poverty.

What You Can Do:

Donate: Even the smallest contributions add up to make a significant impact.

Share: Amplify our fundraiser within your networks to help us reach more people. We know from first hand experience that even small acts of compassion matter. 

Together, we can continue to fight for a future where resources are shared not withheld.

Together, we can ensure CVYM stays open this winter season and remains a beacon of light and a place of hope for people as well as street animals in Tijuana.

Thank you for standing with us. Let’s keep our mutual aid project running, Against All Odds.

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Contra Viento Y Marea (CVYM), a migrant-led kitchen and resource center in Tijuana, needs $1,700 to pay for their kitchen's rent by September 4th. Please help us keep this beautiful mutual aid project alive.

This month, we've been struggling to fundraise enough to cover the cost of September's rent in addition to keeping our community projects funded. If we can't pay our rent, the work we've put in for the last almost 6 years will be completely wiped off the map. We are making a urgent call out for transnational solidarity and support from all those who see mutual aid work as vital, especially in areas like Tijuana where the need is exponentially greater due to extreme violence and abysmal living conditions. We hope to continue our work for many more years to come, but we can't do this without you now.

The cost of our rent is $1,650.00 USD (we're asking for the extra $50 to cover GoFundMe's take).

Any size donation is greatly appreciated. Sharing this fundraiser with others is also a huge help!

Contra Viento Y Marea's Story

Contra Viento Y Marea translates as "Against All Odds." We chose to name our collective after the one and only migrant caravan that's made it all the way from Honduras to the US-MX border. Our mutual aid project was co-founded by Central American migrant youth who arrived in Tijuana with the CVYM caravan and their accomplices, mutual aid organizers emerging from both sides of the borderline to render aid to the caravan members. We started off serving hot meals to the 5,000+ folks who came with the caravan. It's now been almost 6 years since we opened our doors at a community kitchen space.

Throughout these years, we've operated various totally free community programs such as a hot meals program, grocery distro, donations (clothing, meds, hygiene products, etc.) distro, community garden, free school, street animal rescue and support (cats, dogs, chickens, and pigeons) in addition to having organized regular free medical health and acupuncture clinics at our space. We are best known in the community for our free food program, which has served hundreds of thousands of meals at this point. We support migrants/refugees, deportees, local house-less folks, those who suffer from severe addictions, those formerly incarcerated, single mothers, the LGBTQ+ community, neighborhood youth, the unemployed, and then we care for street animals, primarily cats. No one is ever turned away from our programs no matter who they are because we believe in redistributing resources and providing care on a basis of trust and compassion for all.

As a mutual aid group, the work we do for our deeply impoverished community relies entirely on donations and volunteers. We rely primarily on small donations and to a lesser extent, smaller/midsize grants, as well as obtaining support from other mutual aid collectives, nonprofit orgs, businesses, university student groups that align with our values. We've grown a wide network of solidarity locally and also cast a net that extends across borders. We practice mutual aid as a way of life. Please help us continue that daily work.

Thank you for bringing light into the darkness of our world. We stand in solidarity with all those who fight for a future where housing, healthcare, food, and education are completely free for everyone everywhere.