Looking for ways to help Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the hurricanes? Consider this appeal from our friends in the CLT movement:
We are writing to call your attention to a GoFundMe campaign that has been launched to help the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust in San Juan, Puerto Rico in aiding people and repairing homes that were harmed by the latest hurricane that has devastated much of the island. The Champlain Housing Trust has volunteered to be the fiscal agent for this campaign. Any funds collected by CHT will be transferred in their entirety to San Juan and will be used by the Caño Martín Peña CLT in providing humanitarian relief. Here’s the link:
https://www.gofundme.com/cano-martin-pena-relief-fund
In 2008, the Champlain Housing Trust won the UN’s World Habitat Award from the Building and Social Housing Foundation. Last year, that same award was received by the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust. It is especially fitting that one World Habitat awardee is now stepping forward to aid another. Our hope is that additional organizations and individuals within the larger CLT community will be equally inclined to offer assistance to a sister CLT.
We are painfully aware that the flooded, wind-swept areas surrounding the Martín Peña Canal in San Juan are not the only low-income neighborhoods in the United States to have been hard-hit by what the current administration in Washington DC euphemistically calls “extreme weather events.” But Puerto Rico is a special case. The severity of the damage caused by Hurricane Maria, the breadth and depth of the economic crisis in which the island has been mired, and the half-hearted response of the U.S. government to the worsening plight of Puerto Rico’s inhabitants, compel us to take extraordinary action, offering citizen-to-citizen, peer-to-peer support for fellow activists who have been using the CLT model to empower their neighbors and to rebuild their neighborhoods.
Please help us to spread the word about this GoFundMe campaign. And please give what you can.
In solidarity,
Line Algoed
Cosmopolis Center for Urban Research
University of Brussels
John Emmeus Davis
Burlington Associates in Community Development
Burlington, Vermont
David Ireland
Building and Social Housing Foundation
Leicestershire, England
Greg Rosenberg
Land Alliance Inc.
Madison, Wisconsin
Brenda Torpy
Champlain Housing Trust
Burlington, Vermont