EL COSMOS FLORECIENTE ❋ THE BLOOMING COSMOS
Flourishing with Centro Corona-Sustain Our Space. Replenish Each Other

Centro Corona is a volunteer-run community center with a decade-long history in Corona, Queens. We are an intergenerational community space born from the practices, conscientization, and knowledge of working-class and immigrant communities seeking to build autonomy and a collectively-imagined future. We gather to respond to violent, local and global forces that want to destabilize our communities and summon one another to put into practice our collective creativity, care, solidarity and strength. Under challenging conditions, that we constantly study and struggle with, we are gestating a collectively-imagined autonomous future.

Having a physical space to gather is crucial for beings to grow, relate and create together. 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.

Capitalism re-asserts itself through our exploitation causing suffering; we notice that surveillance of public spaces, policing, criminalization and incarceration are strongholds. Our communities face many threats: ever increased surveillance, divestment from social services, extraction of labor, wage theft and gentrification. We witness the shrinking of public space in our neighborhood and our forms of life criminalized.

Although New York City's dominant culture promotes celebration of our cultures and immigrant origins, the material conditions we face are of hate, displacement, impoverishment and tokenization. Even when we’re told our needs, cultures and understanding of the world are taken into account, we see less of ourselves and our forms of life in the places where we live and work.

We are threatened with assimilation to capitalism and colonialism, and we find that it is more difficult to provide and create the conditions that we need for ourselves and our people to live, think, feel, co-create and be in a real loving community. 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.

We believe that collectively we are able to solve the needs of our neighborhood and our cultural and organizing work is for conscientization and a collective thinking-feeling that can respond to the violence our communities face. Our experience of gathering all of our skills started when we moved into an independent space in 2018 to develop our mutual aid skills answering to our communities’ call for support and mutual aid. Since then our space runs thanks to the labor of volunteer networks. Our funds have increased to now be 50% from individual sustainers in comparison to funding from larger philanthropy that helps to cover our larger expense that is rent and basic space upkeep. 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.

Join us and contribute to this fundraising drive, 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. If you’re not a monthly sustainer yet, consider joining that effort too. All contributions matter, and build up towards our shared efforts.

EL COSMOS FLORECIENTE: $60k for Centro Corona

Recauda $60,000 con nosotres este año para sostener nuestro centro en el 2025! ❋ Raise $60,000 with us this year to sustain our center in 2025!