Who We Are & Why We Started
The Springs Mutual Aid Project
aka The Burrito Project
Our story
We are a few local community members who began after we saw that the local community kitchen was closed 8 of the last 14 days of 2025. We have come to recognize the gaps in access to food and resources and now see easy solutions through public participation and collaborations with local businesses and organizations.
Hunger doesn’t take a break, closing for weekends and holidays only makes it more difficult, sometimes potentially life threatening, for those experiencing a lack of access to a free meal.
We can speak to the gaps that we recognize from our own personal and lived experiences. As well as friends and family, who have or are currently experiencing, their own set of harms from a lack of access to basic yet necessary essentials.
We can also see ways to easily change these models of support that operate within the business model of 9-5, M-F to include days and hours when resources are truly needed and made available in places where they are easiest to safely access. If we are truly listening to the needs of those we are trying to support, bankers hours are not sufficient.
With community support and participation, volunteering, resource sharing and organizational collaboration, existing services can easily be expanded on with limited cost or labor to those participating non-profits.
Collectively we have opportunity to refocus directions, to address beyond the immediate needs, by providing alternative solutions for the current systems keeping those needs more immediate.
What if~while we work to provide more access, we also work to alter the conditions that perpetuate a need to consistently provide more access?
Viktor Frankl wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but the last of the human freedoms- the right to choose how he will feel in any given situation, the right to choose his own way”.
He wrote that while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz sweeping up the ashes of his kinfolk. Instead of choosing to be crushed by the weight of his situation he chose hope. Whenever I speak of being an example of Hope to those who might otherwise have none,
I’m just trying to pay forward what Frankl gave to me....
~Ka’Lanë Raposa
Ka’Lanë, Tanya, her mom Gloria & step father John of Springs Mutual Aid Project at Larson Park Ribbon Cutting Mutual Aid Pop Up
Photo taken by Ruchi Shahagadkar of Sonoma Index Tribune
Read the article she wrote here