Creating a Just Recovery for Puerto Rico

Dear GlobalGiving community, 

As we near the end of 2021, the team at La Maraña would like to share its immense gratitude for all of your support throughout this and all of the years. 

Over the past few months, and since we last shared an update with you, our team has been working on transitioning our work from Imaginación Post-María to the next phase of participatory community imagination and design.

As we transition out of a post-disaster model to a forward-looking standpoint of creation and not of repair or mitigation, we look forward to launching Nuestre Espacio Común (Our Common Space.) Our Common Space (hereinafter, NEC) seeks to be a platform to research, plan, imagine and collectively build spaces that tell our stories and that promote climate justice and equity from our communities. Recognizing the absence of accessible resources to carry out projects that advance climate justice, through NEC we will disseminate the participatory planning and design tools developed and make them available to organized communities to enable transformations towards climate justice.

As part of this transition, and 1,500 days after Hurricane María, we made sure to celebrate our partner communities’ successes in an event this past October. This day-long event gave us the opportunity to share in a physical space, after one too many months of virtuality, and once again connect with the dreams and goals that brought us together in the first place. Our partner communities for Imaginación Post Maria -Parceleras Afrocaribeñas por la Transformación Barrial (PATBA), Brigada Palomas, Asociación Recreativa y Educativa Comunal del Barrio Mariana de Humacao (ARECMA)- shared the work of the past three years and their reflections on the importance of participatory design in the the long term vision for the just recovery for communities across Puerto Rico. It was a great day filled with activities, food, joy and connection! 

We are also happy to announce that we have launched the preview to our very own Cartuchera Comunitaria™. We invite you to navigate to cartucheracomunitaria.com and familiarize yourself with the characters that will be leading us through the different kits of community planning and participatory design tools. We have Doña Luz with Community Mapping, Toni and his daughter Adriana with Imaginary Workshops, Susana with Community Processes, Marisa with Participatory Design and Dé with Narrative Justice. Our aim is that by the next time we share an update with you we will have launched the full version. Stay tuned to our social media accounts and let us know what you think!  

Along with this preview, we are also excited to share that we are almost nearing the end of post-production for our documentary, Desde Adentro (From the Inside) and currently fundraising for the finishing touches of this long-awaited piece. We will soon be launching the trailer to this piece and can’t wait to see your reactions. 

We look forward to continue sharing our work with you and thank you for believing in the power of communal and innovative spaces! 

Happy Holiday Season! 

With so much care,
La Maraña's Team

Dear GlobalGiving community, 

We hope you are all coping with the summer heat! Over the past couple of months, our team at La Maraña has been sweating it off to keep our work on schedule and constantly moving forward. 

During the months of May and June we continued facilitating panels across the archipelago as part of the A Cielo Abierto in collaboration with Ayuda Legal’s Just Recovery Campaign. In late June, we hosted the last of the series with a half-day of three panels including: Architecture, gender and participation; A journey from Vieques to Mayagüez and the final panel Paths to a Just Recovery. You can watch the live recordings on our YouTube channel or check out our Instagram channel for quick snippets of the diverse conversations and the communities’ key propositions.

To continue updating you on our ongoing work, we are so very close to finalizing the set of participatory design tools, Cartuchera Comunitaria™, and are planning its launch in the very near future. These tools stem from and have been designed to facilitate imagination, planning and execution of positive changes of communities across Puerto Rico and hopefully beyond. We encourage you to keep a close eye on our social media and email communications as we release teasers and more information about this very exciting project. 

Also, as a result of the learnings from our work over the last four years we are starting to focus on collectively defining La Maraña’s next phase in supporting Puerto Rico’s path toward a just recovery and the collective construction of more sustainable and livable environments. We aim to recognize, visualize, and build a communal space where communities, individuals and organizations gather to imagine, plan and design solutions for the problems their communities strive to supplant. Our aim for the remainder of this year is to focus on the launch of both our Cartuchera Comunitaria™ and Desde Adentro documentary as we transition out of a post-disaster model to a forward-looking standpoint of creation and not of repair or mitigation.

We are also happy to announce that we have finally settled into a new office space in Santurce and are looking forward to opening up our doors to all our allies and supporters. You can visit us at 225 Calle del Parque in San Juan at the historic and awestriking casa González-Cuyar. 

We look forward to sharing the launch of our upcoming projects with you and thank you for continuing to believe in the power of communal and innovative spaces! 

With so much care,
La Maraña's Team