It’s the end of 2025, and we’re together, in a shared understanding of the work that occurs at Centro Corona, and the potentials it sustains for coming together and creating the collective set ups that we need in our neighborhoods and world.
Since we’ve launched this monthly sustainer program, folks have joined in with anything from $5 to $50, each person’s contribution important in sustaining Centro and also in keeping the possibility alive of a community space like Centro, sustained also through practices of cooperative and solidarity economics as well as cross-class solidarity. Thank you for that.
We wanted to share our end of the year fundraising push with you, in order to share communications that matter with you, and also for you to spread this message with your own networks, and perhaps talk to the people around you about Centro Corona, about why the place and the work we have engaged in matters, and about the possibilities it can create. We believe and build towards creating more capacity for collective learning, thought, practice and action that speak about and directly to the issues of this neighborhood, such as displacement, state abandonment as well as institutional and colonial violence that cuts across borders and bodies. If you have been wanting to talk to friends, family members, co-workers, or even people in your place of employment or giving networks, this communication offers important introductions and reminders about this work, so as to send to people in a moment of concentrated effort to sustain this space. If you like to chat more to strategize about how to talk to people in your life about Centro, we’ll be glad to talk, email us at centrocomunitariocorona@gmail.com
We hope to see you at Centro, our gatherings, learning spaces and actions in 2026 and the years to come, and to work together to strengthen our collective practices to sustain this space for the long haul, less dependent on foundations and other institutions.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
Centro Corona, December 2025
A Letter to Our Community, Allies and Networks:
Centro Corona is a community center with a history of more than a decade in Corona, Queens, encompassing struggles in cultural organizing and community building against gentrification, cycles of state violence, extraction, and alienation, in order to build possibilities for collective autonomy and a collectively-imagined future.
We are engaging in an end of the year fundraising push for $20,000 in order to cover rent, space upkeep, and other expenses that make all of our work possible. We’re turning to you all, who might have witnessed our work through the years, or who are getting to know us, in order to meet this goal. Without this push, and more importantly without all of our consistent and continued engagement in sustaining the space, we run the risk of closing. The $20,000 will allow us to start the year with some breathing room to assess our collective fundraising strategy for the year to come, and to continue to strengthen the networks that will sustain us in the long haul.
Our space runs thanks to the labor of volunteer networks, which is also reflected in our funding strategy, with more than 60% of our funds coming from community efforts and allies. We have invested and depend on individual sustainers as well as practices of solidarity economies to make all the things happening at Centro possible. While we engage in larger philanthropy with limited grants, our goal has always been to nurture collective autonomy, so we turn to each other as much as we can, learning along the way. Even as we have grown our sustaining capacity, the challenges that come with it have not eased up, and we don’t access funding from many grants because it remains attached to different measures of community change over time and success that we don’t necessarily hold.
We believe that collectively we are able to solve the needs of our neighborhood and that our cultural and organizing work is for conscientization and a collective thinking-feeling that can respond to the violence our communities face. That is why we want Centro Corona to be a place of respire, education, community, and practice to sharpen the skills we collectively have to care for each other and make the way to our future. This place needs constant and consistent care as well as labor to sustain it, especially during conditions where we witness the shrinking of public space in our neighborhood, our forms of life, thinking and expression criminalized, and a push to drive us into collective fear, without space for collective thinking and articulation, so we could see how our own knowledge production can be a crucial tool to change our conditions.
How to support this call for collective care:
Please consider donating to our fundraiser here: https://givebutter.com/centro2025
If your organization has an employee matching program, and you want to use that benefit please reach out. In the past we have been able to raise $10-$15,000 through this program.
Think of five people you can ask to contribute to our call and send them this email
If you have access to wealth, please consider making a large gift $5,000 and up. Four $5000 donations will get us to our goal!
Think about networks, listservs, other movement spaces where you could help us make the ask
If you're a monthly sustainer, encourage others in your network to become monthly sustainer too!
We’ve done our work in the context of a neighborhood and city defined by crisis that entangles lives and territories across borders. Imperial plunder and class divisions fueling displacement, mass death and mass disabling events met with austerity, militarization, disinformation and organized abandonment, divestment met with pacification of our people and capture of their energy, values and imagination through big non-profits, charities, civic engagement and cultural celebration projects that are only about assimilation and tokenization, normalizing a calculus of cruelty, morality agendas and division for people to survive. It is with urgency to undo and to thread away at these harms that we have worked to make space for thinking/feeling together. To find alternatives of being, of organizing, of creating culture to meet the moment with more clarity.
Community spaces like Centro Corona can be the epicenter of long-term changes we need in our neighborhoods, lives, and worlds. We summon our community networks to participate and help us sustain this space, and to be part of those futures we have glimpsed and have invoked; we are creating chances to regain our capacity to deeply relate to one another, to the land, and to the true history of the world as well as our collective feeling -thinking-memory.
This takes tremendous effort, both in resourcing funds and in sustaining the different threads that make this vision a possibility. Throughout our years of struggle, sustained and led by working class immigrant communities, we’ve nourished structures of collective learning, deep political education, community care networks and practices, and internationalist organizing rooted in collective inquiry across borders, learning rooted in territory, and knowledge production to meet our conditions with that urgency. This work is both one of refusing assimilation, colonization and empire, a work of non-collaboration that simultaneously is also an invitation to create alternative ways of resourcing the changes we need to see in our world. Ritual, assembly, collective study, celebration and inquiry of traditions, learning across diaspora groups, practices of solidarity economies, all these practices of coming together shape the ways we can meet crisis, the ways we can articulate collectivity, and the kind of world we want and deserve as working class people with a deep longing for what is precious in life.
If you’ve witnessed this work, you know the deep changes it can bring to fruition, or at least you can see glimpses of those fruits. Even amidst the current generalized crisis, we feel closer to the goal of community-funded sustenance, and ever more committed to deepen our resistance, struggle and joy in solidarity. Help us keep Centro open, as a space where these possibilities can be practiced.
Join us and contribute to this fundraising push, please share it with your networks, and build with us; connect and learn about our cycles of work, rhythms of creation, rituals and learn more about our gatherings to deepen our analysis, action and joy.
Love & Solidarity,
Centro Corona
centrocomunitariocorona@gmail.com
IG:@centrocorona
* ENGLISH BELOW * INGLÉS ABAJO *
Llega una transmisión misteriosa… ¡LOS CARACOLES han llegado a Centro Corona!
Centro Corona proviene de una larga tradición de encuentros, historias, comunidades, criaturas, y espíritus que mantienen vivo el corazón de nuestro centro. Puede que estés escuchando este mensaje desde nuestra cuadra o desde una galaxia lejana, lo cierto es que alguien que conoces te hizo un llamado para que nos ayudes a sostener nuestro centro comunitario.
A todes les que se han comprometido a dar al Centro mensualmente: todes ustedes forman la fundación que fortalecen nuestro crecimiento. Bienvenides y hola de nuevo. En Centro Corona, ustedes son los caracoles. Los caracoles devuelven nutrientes a la tierra al descomponer animales y plantas muertas. Sus caparazones se mueven en un espiral, y se mueven lentamente. Los caracoles nos recuerdan que en Centro Corona, construimos el mundo que queremos empezando desde nuestra cuadra, irradiando hacia afuera a paso lento pero constante, y apoyándonos en las conexiones que nos alimentan.
Ahora están todes conectados a través de nuestra órbita. ¿Qué mejor manera de honrar esto que reunirse? Nuestra primera orientación virtual de caracoles será el sábado, 17 de junio de 1 a 3 PM ET. Aunque hayas donado o no : ¡ven! Esta reunión es una oportunidad para invitar a más seres querides al programa de contribuyentes mensuales (¡invítales!). Estudiaremos juntes sobre lo que se necesita para mantener vivo un centro comunitario autónomo y, realmente, una oportunidad para conocernos. La meta es estar juntes, y después haremos seguimiento individual con quien quiera saber más sobre sobre sostener el Centro a largo plazo. REGISTRATE aquí.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
A mysterious transmission arrives… SNAILS have come to Centro Corona!
Centro Corona hails from a long history of gatherings, stories, communities, creatures, and spirits who keep the heart of our center alive. Whether you are tuning in from our own block or from a far off galaxy, somebody you know called on you to join us to sustain our community center.
To everybody who’s committed to giving to Centro monthly: you all lay a foundation that strengthens our growth. Welcome, welcome back, and hello again. At Centro Corona, you are our snails. Snails return nutrients back into soil by breaking down dead plants and animals. Their shells run in a spiral, and snails move slow. They remind us that at Centro Corona, we build the world we want by starting from our block, radiating outward at a slow and steady pace, and relying on our connections far and wide to nourish us.
You’re now all connected through our orbit. What better way to honor that than to get together? Our first virtual Snail Orientation will be on Saturday, June 17th at 1 to 3 PM ET. Whether you’ve donated or haven’t: come out! It’s a time to introduce more loved ones to Centro Corona’s new sustainer program (bring them!), study together about what it takes to keep an autonomous grassroots center alive, and really, meet each other. We’ll be there to gather, then reach out one-on-one to anybody after who wants to know more about sustaining Centro for the long-haul. RSVP here.