Border Kindness Water Drops & Humanitarian Aid
Since 2016, the leadership of the Border Kindness Water Drop team has remained a consistent presence along the California borderlands, offering life-saving humanitarian aid throughout the desert. With the advent of tighter border security, migrants have been forced to navigate more dangerous and life-threatening corners of the mountains and desert, making the need for life-saving provisions even more necessary.
Each week, the Border Kindness Water Drop Team hikes to these remote corners of the borderlands, placing water, food, health, and safety items along areas of known migration and death in an effort to ensure no more migrants lose their lives. The Border Kindness Water Drop team is led by individuals with deep roots in the community and cause, which informs their commitment to this preservation of life.
Border Kindness Children’s Empowerment Center
Border Kindness believes access to a quality education is a fundamental right of every human. The Border Kindness Children’s Empowerment Center provides classes and opportunities for children to learn to code, embrace STEM, and gain 21st-century skills, as well as learn about nutrition, empathy, communication, English, and more.
The Center is managed and staffed exclusively by women from Mexicali and often hosts guest speakers/instructors for programs for teens and tweens, including special events to inspire and create opportunities for girls and young women. The center is a safe place for the children in our border community to express themselves and flourish.
The Center currently provides food, clothing, medical care, tutoring, access to technology, STEM classes, and art activities to asylum-seeking and local children in Mexicali.
Border Kindness Migrant Assistance Programs
Border Kindness provides asylum-seekers, migrants, refugees, and other highly vulnerable populations with food, shelter, clothing, medical & dental care, transportation, access to communication and technology, and legal services. Our most visible work includes reuniting families separated during the Trump administration, providing medical care and food to migrants (and others) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and assisting and supporting families returned to Mexico after seeking asylum in the USA.
Border Kindness often provides asylum-seekers with employment within our response programs while they are in Mexico. Our innovative and impactful work assisting migrants has been widely acknowledged on social media by community leaders, influencers, and activists, including Amnesty International, Eva Longoria, Prince Harry & Meghan Markle, Jennifer Lopez, the National Basketball Players Association, and others. Border Kindness is an outspoken advocate for justice and the organization regularly attracts media coverage, including NPR, PBS, CBS, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NBC News, and more.
Border Kindness Day Laborer Outreach
The term day laborers describes workers who are hired and paid for their services one day at a time, without the promise or stability of full-time employment. These migrant workers seek opportunities to be self-sufficient and provide for their families, and often fill skilled positions in construction, maintenance, and landscaping. Every morning, day laborers gather and wait to be hired, and while their work requires a high level of skill and effort, because migrant workers lack employment protections, they are vulnerable to exploitation including wage and labor theft.
Migrant workers often arrive without the supplies necessary to establish themselves as self-sustaining laborers and can struggle to find regular employment without necessary supplies such as protective clothing. The Border Kindness Day Laborer Outreach Team regularly visits local day laborer sites, distributing clothing and supplies such as work shirts suitable for construction, gloves, socks, boots, and sun-protective hats. They couple these with offerings of food and information, providing the day laborer community with Know Your Rights information to educate them regarding their legal rights to fair and complete wages.