Dear Sarah,
In 2025, our first full year as an organization, we have been blown away by your support! It was a year we did not anticipate with our beloved community going through Fire and ICE. With the Eaton Fire in Altadena affecting more than 26 of our grant recipients we mobilized our resources to come alongside people in the early hours and days after they got some of the worst news of their lives. Many in our beloved community are still just beginning to recover from the fires of January 2025, thankfully your partnership assures them they don't have to walk this journey alone.
Then this summer when ICE raids began in Los Angeles, you were there with us – providing financial and legal support for those who had been wrongfully detained and were afraid to leave their homes. Other grants went towards keeping people housed, paying for unexpected car or funeral expenses, helping a young widow on SNAP feed her family, orthodontic care for a deserving teenager, gas and food money for a government worker impacted by the shutdown so they could continue to get to work while not being paid, and the list goes on....we just awarded our 53rd grant as an organization (our 50th in 2025!) This far exceeded our expectations.
In addition to grants, in our Community Education pillar we offered 9 weeks of online education: our 6 week Intro to Racial Justice Class, a Trauma and Resilience class for fire impacted friends, and a two week Menopause 101 class. We’re already dreaming about our course offerings for 2026 (and if you have an idea for a class/topic let us know, we’d love to hear from you, just reply to this email).
Under the “spiritual care” pillar of our work together we offered 7 retreats in NW Kenya, four for hospital/hospice staff, two for children impacted by cancer and/or living in a rural area, and one for ex-pats impacted by the cancellation of PEPFAR and USAID. We imagined our first two retreats would be in the LA Area, at monasteries where we have hosted retreats before. But the fires impacted both the Serra Retreat Center in Malibu and Mater Dolorosa in Sierra Madre, so we went abroad. Together we achieved more than we ever thought possible in our first year as a nonprofit. YOUR partnership helped make all of this possible.
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