Kickstarter

The Los Angeles Burrito Project is a group of 10-20 people from across LA who come together Wednesday nights to make a few hundred burritos and bike them along with bottles of water to individuals on skid row. LABP is entirely self funded – they get tortillas donated to them and hold occasional fund raisers, but the bulk of their money comes from each volunteer pitching in a few dollars to cover the weekly cost of the project.

In January, LABP will have been around for 5 years, and during that time there have been tons of changes to the cityscape. Cycling culture has exploded, downtown has been increasingly gentrified, and their own volunteer base is now comprised of few people who started the project. Right now, the problems these changes pose are particularly salient – in recent weeks donations have been down resulting in a week with no water, and there has been a lot of debate surrounding the role of food distribution groups in perpetuating homelessness and litter problems on skid row.

We want to do more than just profile LABP as a food distribution group - we want to examine how volunteer groups like the Burrito Project sustain themselves, how they deal with changing situations, and what lets them endure rather than fall apart. But to do that, we need equipment. We need decent microphones, smaller cameras that we can mount on a bicycle, and some money to pay for travel to interview other burrito projects. Plus, any money we don’t wind up needing for equipment will go towards helping Burrito Projects in other cities get off the ground.

So help us document a really unique group, how they’ve changed over the years, and how the city they try to make just a little bit better has responded. There’s a lot to their story, and with your help we can really tell it well.

Mayra Flores and Charlie Furman
B.A. Cinema-Television Critical Studies Candidates

If you want more information before you donate, don’t hesitate to ask – we love talking about LABP and our documentary efforts.