Many of you know I’ve been trying to get a modern indie bookstore up and running in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The neighborhood I now call home was once our stomping grounds—it isn’t anymore. It’s been overtaken by gentrification. The only way to fight it is to try as much as we can to open brick and mortar businesses wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head, but how can we do that without generational wealth, without grants, without loans?

We only have ourselves. It’s always been like that and it’ll always be like that.

It truly does take a village.

At the moment, 10, 20, 30 grand would help tremendously. At least to find a small place to put away merchandise. It will help with a used vehicle to carry inventory to and fro. It will also help tremendously with the donations awaiting to be picked up across the tristate area so we can keep helping those in need. There are a ton of you waiting for me…

I am here. Let’s make this happen.

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César Vargas is an award-winning writer, advocate, strategist, speaker, and social critic with a loyal following and a robust social capital that spans from coast to coast: Editors, journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, and multiple communities. He was named one of 40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics by the Huffington Post. He’s written about internal and external community affairs to several news outlets and quoted in others: The Huffington Post, NBC, Fox News, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own online magazine—which has a fan base of over 25,000 people and has reached over a million—UPLIFTT. He’s familiar with having a voice that informs, invigorates, and inspires people—creating content that usually goes viral. He recently won two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his films Some Kind of Spanish and Black Latina Unapologetically. He attained a degree in Films Studies from Queens College, CUNY. He is currently raising and distributing funds for Haitians in Sosúa.