Please Help Us Hire a Part-Time Director
One Story has grown beyond any of our wildest expectations—saving lives and providing food, safety, education, medical help, and hope. Because of the ongoing, dire situation at the border, we require funding to hire a part-time executive director who can spend time in Tijuana to keep expanding our program.
We are beginning a campaign to raise $44,000 for a year’s salary and are raising $3,600 for the first month’s salary. Our work is desperately needed there; help us help others.
Smaller donations are requested through our GoFundMe campaign; larger ones can be sent directly to One Story to receive tax benefits.
Please help us help those at the border.
With gratitude, Linda Carroll, Co-Founder
Just One Gala at a Time
Our 2021 Virtual Gala was a great success, raising much-needed and greatly-appreciated funding for our initiatives!
We send our appreciation to Peter Yarrow, Marshall Chapman, and Jeanine Cummins for their warmth and insight during the Gala.
And we send our gratitude to all who donated.
Click the video to watch and listen to our archive of this lovely evening.
Our mission is to bring humanitarian aid and hope to the most vulnerable people and sentient beings in Mexican border towns and to support the volunteers who help to provide those in need with basic necessities, education, and life-affirming opportunities.
The Perla Monroy Family Arrives in Oregon
We are thrilled, relieved, and humbled: after months of following their plight and supporting their efforts to reach safety, the five members of Perla Monroy family have crossed the border and are now living in Corvallis, Oregon! An extra boost of confidence allows us, with permission, to now use their real family name.
Read our profile of them (HERE), Aimee Ginsburg Bikel’s essay, where you’ll see them as the “Portillo” family (HERE), and Fernanda Echavarri’s diary in Mother Jones magazine of the Perla family’s experiences that are both poignant and filled with hope:
Look at These Faces!
We often hear so much about the overwhelming stories of terror and loss regarding the migrants’ plight.
Today, we want to offer you a moment to feel the possibility of hope, resilience, and even joy.
Because of the generosity of so many of you we were able to deliver hundreds of backpacks to kids in Tijuana. Deon and Eric Merten from Corvallis are spearheading the Backpacks at the Border project.
Let’s keep it going.
Thank you so much. Please take a moment to enjoy these beautiful faces.
Backpacks at the Border
We have an urgent need to help a particularly large number of kids, ages 1 to 18, who are arriving in large numbers at the border. They are receiving food but only have the clothes on their backs. Many have arrived from detention containers in the U.S.
We were able to deliver 250 backpacks to the Center for Unaccompanied Children in Juarez, Mexico, and many more to shelters in Tijuana. Urgently, we need more: we are collecting backpacks and items to place in them to help during this uncertain time.
Click HERE for our list of recommended items.
If you, your family, church, friends, or school would like to help or support this project, please connect with Linda…
OUR PANDEMIC RESPONSE
In these troubled and troubling days of the COVID-19 pandemic…
One Story at a Time is working to help a number of people and sentient beings in shelters in Mexican border towns confront the peril⏤with food, medicine, masks, and hygiene products.
Among the many people and shelters we support with food medicine, blankets, and backpacks are Embajadores de Jesus, Little Haiti, Camino de Salvacion, Roca de Salvacion, Camp at the Border, Agape, Espacio, Juventud 2000, Pro Amore, Embajadores, Camp in Chaparral, and Jasson y Alexander Center for Unaccompanied Minors.
PLEASE DONATE.
Your generosity helps our effort immensely.
$8 suggested.
more if you can, less if it is a hardship.
The Resilience Program
One Story at a Time is thrilled to announce our Resilience Program, with initiatives designed to help migrants on the border grow in many ways.
Our mission is to positively impact the lives of refugees and displaced women and children in Tijuana’s refugee shelters and in the area’s most vulnerable, disadvantaged communities. We offer literacy and art therapy to kids in the shelters and are always looking for ways to help migrants feel empowered and find a new dream.
One example of this is the beautiful bags we are having made. We have hired a refugee, Ana, from El Salvador, who crafts the bags in the tenango style. Women from the indigenous community of Hidalgo, Mexico, embroider these bags. We intend to help Ana start a small cooperative.
Why Us?
Your understanding and your support of these thousands of people on the border— caught between the lives they fled and the lives they seek — will help in direct, positive, and immediate ways.
We see the remarkable effects of your contributions. Your $10 provides a month of vitamins, your $20 those five new blankets, your $90 a new violin for a child to join an orchestra, your $200 a family’s opportunity to move from the streets into a safe community.
Know that our board members are not armchair fundraisers. Collectively, we are in border communities the entire year. And we take absolutely no salaries for our work.
The situation is extreme and often overwhelming. That’s why we choose to affect change with one pair of shoes, one medical exam, one scholarship, one teacher’s salary, one person, one story at a time.
Our goal is solidarity, not charity. The results? Time and again, as we continue to experience: your support is a way for us — migrant and donor alike — to reconnect with our own dignity.
One Story board member Jill Thiry started “Sonidos de Sanacion,” a threshold choir in Tecate. Says Jill: “Sarah Livia Brightwood Szekely (President of Rancho La Puerta) recruited Maria Lourdes (Lulu) and Hermana Esperanza to sing with her. When a guest at the Ranch told Jill that Peter Yarrow wanted to sing at the border, she was able to reach out to Lulu. Within days the first concert had been scheduled, and rest is history. That was the night One Story at a Time was born.”
Just One Donation at a Time
Your support makes a world of difference.
Please join us.
One Story at a Time
Beyond the politics and logistics, beyond the policies and the legalities, our open hearts respond to the news of the refugee and migrant crises on our Southern borders. Many of our own ancestors — even our own parents and grandparents —arrived in this country as refugees, escaping violence and untenable living situations, desperate to provide a better life for their children.
Our compassion stems not only from our own histories but also springs from our natural deep wells of love for all of our sisters and brothers. We hear their stories and feel called to action.
Shelter, Food & Clothing
Your contributions have helped us in . . .
Building
bunk beds in shelters.
Providing
prepaid Visa cards for food and hygiene supplies for safe houses.
Delivering
boxes of clothes, blankets, and healthy snacks for people living in the depths of poverty.
Inspiration, Aspiration & The Arts
We support people by teaching music, art, and literacy to the impoverished as a way to feed both inspiration and hope. Many of the people we serve have suffered major trauma, abuse, and loss, and we believe the arts offer one way to help them cope. We have sent art supplies to safe houses for children, and one of our new stories includes helping support the remarkable work of musician Ron Wakefield.
Teaching
music, art, and literacy.
Helping
to cope with trauma, abuse, and loss.
Sending
art supplies to safe houses for children.
Education & Job Training
Although primary school is free, the fees for school supplies, uniforms, and transportation often add up to the equivalent of a family’s entire monthly salary. We supplement families that cannot afford to send their children to school. Another initiative is to teach women rescued from violent and hopeless situations to care for themselves with a new vocation. Your donations have purchased new sewing machines. With contributions to this long-term investment, many women will now have a new vocation they can use while transitioning from their previous lives.
Helping
abused women care for themselves with a new vocation.
Contributing
long-term investments to assist woman transitioning from their previous lives.
Supplementing
families who cannot afford to send their children to school.