Dear Kay and Carmen:

For the past 8 years CASA has received your incredible organizational support and guidance. We have been inspired by the work of the Faithful Fools Street Ministry of San Francisco and incorporated the witness-reflection-action model of activism into our own work. We have also taken to heart the many insights you have shared with us over the years. Your staff has been an indispensable resource and we thank everybody for their kindness, responsiveness, and professionalism.

Without your fiscal sponsorship, the launching of CASA would have been delayed, or perhaps never begun at all. CASA started as the Chiapas Peace House Project, heeding the call of the Zapatistas for international solidarity and movement building. It was 2001, and it was a time of escalated fear and anger. Thank you for believing in our mission and providing us with the tools to go out into the world and fight for human rights, when the odds were against us.

The goal of CASA has always been to expand the channels for human rights work from Mexico to the US, but over the course of these past 8 years our work has unfolded and evolved in many more ways. We have provided a community presence in places of conflict and created a space for minds and hearts to process, mutually nurture, and develop in a safe and stimulating environment. Through outreach, education, and training, we have helped foster greater awareness of social struggles in Mexico and beyond. We have expanded our own consciousness of the activist networks that exist across borders, and formed strategic partnerships and collaborations with a diversity of organizations, groups, and people dedicated to social justice. We went from having a peace house in Chiapas, to opening one in Oaxaca when teacher struggles were nearing a pinnacle moment and the government was responding with violence. We covered the movement and wrote a book to tell about it. Teaching Rebellion is quite possibly our greatest accomplishment to date, enabling us a far greater hands-on reach for sharing our work than was possible before.

Our biggest challenge has been financing this project, but through your organizational support, we were able to develop our website and make it easy for online donations to take place. And the support that the Faithful Fools gave us in terms of donated labor for bookkeeping and fiscal sponsorship which allowed us to stretch our resources even further.

We thank you for all that you have given us over the years. Your support has allowed us to support the work of hundreds of activists and have a positive impact on communities not only in the United States and Mexico but anywhere our volunteers come from be it Europe, India, South America or even Africa.

Respectfully,

Colin Bossen and Roxanne Rivas,
On behalf of CASA