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Overview:

We are crowdfunding a down payment for a home for Katia, Michaela’s 15-year-old former DPS student who dreams of returning to Denver from Honduras for school, and for Dalila, who has dreamed of purchasing a home since she immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen and who plans to co-guardian Katia with Michaela. The house will not only provide a comfortable home for this reimagined family, but also seed a rental business to fund their expanded living expenses! Go-fundit will match your donations 2:1, provide $10 for every campaign post shared and connect corporate donations up to 25% from each of your daily spending through the Upit chrome extension! Click “Contribute Now” to give online with a debit or credit card. Homefundit will then donate $2 for every $1 raised, through a lender matching grant. When you shop, make sure you stop by our campaign page first and visit the UpIt Store link under the “Contribute Now” button. Thanks a million for your support and please take a moment to learn about our reimagined family’s dreams below!

Our Reimagined Family’s Dreams

Katia Elizabeth Sanchez:

Hello! My name is Katia and I am 15 years old. I was born in the United States in the state of Virginia in 2008. I currently live in Honduras. My mom returned to Honduras when I was 6 months old. I have 3 brothers and I live with my mother, brothers and grandmother. My dream is to return to the U.S., study, graduate and get a job to give my mom and brothers a better life. I studied in Denver at Goldrick in fourth grade with Ms. Miller. Five years ago, I reconnected with Ms. Miller because of information in a notebook she gave me at my farewell before returning to Honduras. I want to go to the United States now to take advantage of my high school years, study and learn English. My hobbies here are drawing and painting. At school, I love Art and Spanish. I feel very happy and grateful that the donors can make my dream come true. For me, this house purchase is very important because I’ll have a comfortable home and financial support that my mother could not afford, and it will help me prepare for the future.

Dalila Lopez Sanchez:

Hello! My name is Dalila López Sánchez. I am a single mom and I moved to Colorado in 2006 looking for a better life. I started working as a cleaner and continue now even though I thought it would be temporary while raising my 4 children. I have lived in so many small apartments and have dreamed of one day buying a house and changing jobs. In 2012, I began organizing with COPA, an organization that fights for immigrant rights, where I met Michaela in 2017 and we started a beautiful friendship. We also have traded cleaning over the years for lessons in English, math, computation, swimming and any questions I’ve had, as Michaela always helps me where she can academically, and with my career and passions/dreams. This year, I told her about my desire to buy a house and to be a foster parent and she told me about Katia. I remembered when I came to the United States, also at 16 years old and having my mother and brothers here was the best. When Katia comes, she won't have her parents or brother in person like I had. But the fact that I speak the same mother tongue as her will help us connect. I started to imagine connecting more with our similar Hispanic cultures and even with food. I plan to learn how to cook Katia’s favorite dishes so that she feels more at home. I am already anticipating these details and I'm excited. I told Michaela that if only I had a bigger place to stay for me and my family, it could be possible. So, we began to see how to make it happen… but with the current economy, it seemed impossible for me. An idea came to us. Part of the house that I want to buy will be used to rent rooms and the income will be used to support us with expanded housing expenses, as an expanded family. It will also help me learn new vocations to not only depend on cleaning work that is increasingly physically difficult, like foster parenting and rental property management. The other obstacle for me is the down payment. It's hard to save for a down payment when everything is expensive and prices continue to rise. Knowing about this fundraising program brings light in a time of darkness. I am immensely grateful for each donor. Your help will go a long way and encompass so much. Each contribution will make my dream of buying a house and Katia's dream of having a home and future here possible.

Michaela Miller:

Hi! My name is Michaela and I am a business & housing co-op founder/co-owner and educator. I moved to Denver in 2017 to settle down for life, drawn to DPS’s bilingual programs and the immigrant justice movement, as I had just completed my teaching credential in bilingual elementary education. In 2018, my 4th grade student, Katia, suddenly told me she was returning to Honduras where her parents lived and that we would never see each other again. We both sobbed on the hot blacktop. I reached out to everyone I knew immediately to figure out how to support her journey home to her parents. My therapist friend, Margaret, suggested I give her a journal to process her experiences and include my contact info in case she needed anything, something that at the time felt painfully small. I showed up at the house she was staying at against school policy to give her the journal and every day for months afterwards, I wondered if she and her younger brother had made it, until one day she called me! For the last 4 years, Katia has reached out to me every couple days to ask how I am and send her best wishes. When her family faced economic hardship and health issues due to COVID-19, I began to support her and her family financially and emotionally and called in the community to support. Every fundraiser I ran hit our goals and over the years, we were able to get her brother life-saving COVID medical attention, her grandmother a vital brain scan and Katia a computer for online learning. Over the last few years, she’s been asking to return to Denver to study high school in English and be set up for success for college here with academic skills and FAFSA eligibility. I knew I couldn’t do it alone while running a business & housing co-op, and I also knew that my guardianship experience fell more on the side of financial, bureaucratic and educational support. I also struggled with imagining a comfortable and familiar living situation for Katia. Simultaneously, ever since I bought Looms of Liberation’s house, I’ve wanted to make home ownership possible for my friends in the neighborhood too. Co-guardianship, alternative family structures, and co-buying real estate are no foreign concepts to me, nor networking overlapping self-interests to manifest dreams. So, after Katia’s last call, I knew Dalila was a perfect fit for a co-guardian and co-buyer, one of the most nurturing and bold parents I know and someone I’ve trusted, shared memories with and organized with since my first day in Denver 6 years ago. Dalila deserves more than anything this comfortable home for her expanded family, an opportunity for upward mobility and an opportunity to mentor my beloved former student, Katia. With incredible strategizing support from co-buying real estate agent, Sarah Wells, we’ve confronted barrier after barrier to getting approved for the perfect home by Garfield Lake Park, and we couldn’t be more ecstatic to discover this one-of-a-kind crowdfunding opportunity that creatively gets around painfully classist real estate laws! Your donations are our passport to realizing this reimagined family’s dreams and we couldn’t be more grateful for your participation!

Dreams for a Re-Imagined Family

Team Members