Mission: Activate, build capacity, and support community-based organizations to ensure their impact and sustainability.

Vision: Healthy, united, and flourishing communities that honor origins, identities, and power.

Colaborativa La Milpa is a collective of grassroots organizations, based in the Emma Community of Buncombe County, NC, that has come together to share resoures in ways that allow everyone to have great impact and sustainability. 

Over the past 20 years, Latinx immigrant leaders in the Emma neighborhood ( Anigiduawagi/Cherokee land) have been organizing around mutual aid, community defense, and the uplift of our cultures. From these efforts, a number of grassroots organizations emerged including Nuestro Centro ( now Raíces Emma-Erwin), CIMA, PODER Emma Community Ownership and Mä hñäkihu: Indigenous Language Preservation Project. After years of deep collaboration, in 2018, our organizations officially united to implement a vision for greater cooperation and sustainability. Colaborativa La Milpa was established in collective response for building capacity around fundraising, planning, evalutation and coordinated strategic approaches. 

Colaborativa La Milpa is creating a model for sharing infrastructure so more energy can go directly to our programs, and for combining effrots to avoid duplicating work. We come together to break patterns of isolation that exist on individual and organizational levels. We practive building community, being in true solidarity, and being in collaboration rather than competition. We believe that working collectively expands our impact. We affirm that each of our organizations is stronger when all all of our organizations are thriving. 

Click on CIMA, PODER or Raíces to visit their websites. 

CIMA Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción

Mä hñäkihu: Indigenous Language Preservation Project leads efforts to strengthen the connection to the Hñähñu culture and language so that it lives on in future generations. This project engages the many Emma residents who have roots in the Hñähñu community in the Mezquital Valley of Hildalgo, Mexico. 

PODER Emma Community Ownership

Raíces Emma-Erwin Arts and Culture Program