10 years of HASER and a major collective win
We celebrated HASER’s 10th anniversary with an opening event for Edi Rizoma together with Alliances in our Network of Actions, partners, community groups, nonprofit organizations, family and friends.
Edi Rizoma is a shared space where community-based groups can work, collaborate, and catalyze projects focused on equity, quality of life, and social transformation. It is a place to embrace possibility and collective action, and to stand firm in our right to imagine and reshape the world. It is part of a strategic collaboration with María Fund, the Institute for Research and Action in Agroecology (IALA-PR), and Amigxs del M.A.R.
For a decade, we have been dreaming of a shared space where community groups can collaborate and come together to uphold our right to remain and create a Puerto Rico with greater equity and quality of life for everyone. Edi Rizoma is the result of 10 years of imagining, discussing, and devising collective ways to take action and create a more equitable Puerto Rico with better quality of life for all.
HASER stems from a very simple idea: that all meaningful change is local, and that communities possess the wisdom and the will to bring about social transformations that improve their lives. Our theory of change is rooted in working with organized communities and in creating and sharing resources to strengthen, expand, advocate, and transform through collective action.
Community groups in Puerto Rico have carried out effective and critical work for more than 50 years, putting their own bodies and resources at the service of the common good—whether to ensure that drinking water reaches their neighborhoods, to stop a toxic mining project, or to open spaces for self-determination and affirmation for historically marginalized and excluded people.
Puerto Rico has a long history of successful initiatives based on mutual aid, cooperativism, self-management, and solidarity within the context of decolonial, feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, labor, and environmental struggles. While the government and the private sector push social and community projects to compete for funds and opportunities, in Puerto Rico the desire to engage in collective work endures, against all odds.
How can we nurture and stimulate self-management and transformation through grassroots collective action? Most organized communities need funding, but they also need guidance, transportation, workspace and organizational support, materials, and technical assistance—whether to write a grant proposal, set up an accounting system, or obtain a permit for an event. We have created a shared infrastructure sustained by aligned visions, relationships, and systems that serve as a springboard for mobilization and transformation across the Puerto Rican archipelago. We believe in the collective capacity to generate power, distribute resources fairly, and foster change through community action.
We know that working collectively takes more time, but it is an antidote to the systems that divide us, paralyze us, and exhaust us. There comes a point in community and social struggles when the body aches. It is vital to create a safe, open space to work, regenerate, recharge, recognize that it is still possible to transform our environment, and remember that part of resilience is not losing sight of the horizon of what is possible.
Thank you to the Alliances in our Network of Actions who have placed their trust in HASER and have generously offered to create alongside us. To collaborating organizations that have embarked on long-term missions for the future of Puerto Rico. To our donors who are committed to investing in transformative processes that take time. To María Fund, IALA-PR, and Amigxs del MAR for accepting our invitation to create a shared space for social and environmental justice movements. And to the Utuado Street neighborhood, which welcomed us with warmth and a desire to be part of Edi Rizoma.
About Edi Rizoma
The space serves the networks of HASER, María Fund, the Institute for Research and Action in Agroecology (IALA-PR), and Amigxs del M.A.R. Edi Rizoma brings together organizations, networks, and projects committed to social and environmental justice in Puerto Rico. It is a 30,000-square-foot facility in San Juan that connects initiatives through collaboration, shared responsibility, and collective empowerment to sustain and build a more just and supportive archipelago. Visit edirizoma.org to learn more.
About HASER
HASER is a Puerto Rican organization founded in 2016 with the mission of promoting the social well-being of communities in Puerto Rico through community-based projects aimed at achieving greater equity and quality of life. We share infrastructure, resources, and knowledge. We facilitate access to funding and tools so that community groups can lead and sustain initiatives for social transformation.
