West LA Burrito Project

…we need dem. if you are so fortunate to have extras and were just about to throw them away. bring them to the next bpjkt.

Hi, I’m a spoon type tool of sorts.

Hi, I’m a cutting tool of sorts

Bonjour, I am a french lid. I spend my days writing poetry by the river. If it wasn’t for gravity, I’d be worthless.

jah bless

bina banton

Hey Everyone,

It’s interesting to take a step back and see the difference burrito project has made. Our recipe is unrecognizable from when we started and the faces I see come in are no longer people that come to my house and make food, but people who I know and love.

While I truly enjoy running burrito project, the responsibilities are a little too great for me to handle alone especially with my new work load. I had a blast setting up burrito project, coming up with cheeky emails and making sure everything was ready for each project. For those of you who have been coming for years, you remember the characters that have come through, the stories we’ve told and the people we’ve helped and that will not change, but the time has come for me to pass the torch.

I never really had plans for it to get so big. I’m now the proud owner of enough cooking materials to serve a small army and I look suspiciously into my fridge when I don’t see giant containers of sour cream and tortillas abound. I’ve mentioned in the past that burrito project may be moving from week to week, and that is really what this is about.

For the next 4 weeks at burrito project, with your help I want to come up with a repeatable structure for our burrito project that other projects can copy and use themselves. We’ll then spend 3 months working out kinks to the system and I hope to pass on burrito project to a handful of dedicated people who will take the burrito project to the next step.

I’m definitely going to have a part of the next phase of bpj, I just feel like its time for me to pass it on to someone with more time and dedication to the project. I’ll still be hosting BPJs for the next few months and after that occasionally. If you are interested in taking more of a role in BPj, just come by, we’ll be talking about it casually while we cook. If you can’t make it but you want to get involved, email / fb / text us.

Allen

About a month ago we partnered with the Census Bureau to help with taking a census of the homeless we serve at WLABP. The speedy response and the collaboration from the Census was magnificent.  A large group from the Census came out as promised on March 29, 2010 to Third Street Promenade in SaMo to meet us.

We introduced ourselves to them.   I gave them an overview of our work which they were please and we all got right to it.  Because of the special circumstances, the delivery took a little longer.  As we handed out the burritos, we asked the recipients if they would answer a few questions about the themselves.  Because of privacy laws, we weren’t allowed to ask the questions, but we served as liaisons and successfully had the participation of everyone.

All in all,  the entire night was a success!  Not only did we hand out 93 burritos that night, we had a smaller crew because of Passover, and we took part in “Census 2010!”

Lupe A.

hey people, we want to raise enough funding for burrito project for one year. each week we give out about 50-80 burritos to the hungry in santa monica. we buy everything from scratch and do our best to bring down the cost to almost nothing. our cost for each burrito is about $1.10 or about $100 / project. x52 / year = about $5,000 / year. While we’d love to approach the subject of raising funds every week like some projects do, I’d also love to get this done in a handful of donations. If you know someone who can afford a $100 donation or greater, let me know. That donation goes 100% to paying for food and storage (jars / bags / etc). Ideally someone with the dough will drop $5k and we’ll just stick to making burritos.

alnbna

so i finally got around to making the recipe page all spiffy like. check it out.

We’re spreading herpes in the Hilton family. I know of at least 3 other burrito projects that have sprouted up in LA of recent. While I think this site gives us a chalkboard of stuff to write, we need a bpj wide site to share recipes, and other similar stuff. I’m starting burritoproject.org in the future to be that point.

big stuff

alnbna

Hey folks, we’ve graduated from 2x/ month to every Monday. What does that mean: no more confusion about when we’re going to show up. No more confusion about when burrito project is happening. No more confusion when you turn the ignition when your car is already on and it makes that noise and everyone starts looking at you…. maybe not that, but the other two for sure. Speaking of confusion, you’ll notice we have stuff repeated all over this site so ignore all the 2 week references from now on.

Thanks for making wlabp great and see you weekly.

alnbna

I’m working on making a burrito project community, where not only do people meet at burrito projects, but other burrito projects connect and communicate. stay tuned for www.burritoproject.org for details.

allen

Here are a couple videos of an entire project start to finish.