The JRM needs your help

About two years ago, with heavy hearts, we had to close our doors. Suppliers were hiking up prices and order minimums, failing to deliver needed items or skipping our deliveries entirely in favor of serving larger businesses. Daily sales were not enough to cover costs, debt was piling up and after two years of unpaid labor for Merry the chef of our beloved dips, we had to call it quits. What started as a way to try to support the CSPP and local makers became a growing financial burden on a Palestinian organizer and his mother; a woman born in Jerusalem who was sharing the culinary heritage of her people pro bono. Despite telling us they would, our landlord refused to transfer the remaining lease over to a willing and ready tenant with grant funding to open a store of their own. Instead of fulfilling their verbal agreement to us, they silently declared us in breach of lease, changed the locks on the doors preventing us from even trying to use the space for community initiatives and sent us to collections for over 24k. Adding insult to injury, the landlord had the audacity to claim we damaged the space. Some may recall that when the space was originally rented, the floor was collapsing, the walls were rotting and the back area was an absolute mess. The shop owner poured over $40,000 of materials and a year of his own unassisted labor to fix the floors and build out what became the JRM- what we can all agree was an absolute gem. So when the landlord communicated this outright lie and that even our security deposit would be held it became very clear how much ill was being enacted. The space sat empty for almost all of the last two years with not even a ‘for rent sign’ in the windows still bearing our painted logos and messages. To make things worse, about a year ago the collections agency out of Southern Oregon filed a lawsuit against us and now we have been ordered by court to pay nearly $25,000. At the end of the day this all feels very anti-Palestinian and anti- SWANA. It feels as if we were being punished for trying to build an openly Palestinian community market, serving a Palestinian and SWANA community center. Even a collections agency and lawyer out of a historically white supremacist haven feels pointed. If not that, it is surely exploitation of a “legal system” that only really exists to allow the wealthy and their corporations to extract maximum resources from the working class and the environment.

We are asking for your help. If you ever visited the JRM or didn’t and wished you had, your help now would greatly alleviate this completely unnecessary and unfair financial punishment that a landlord and the agents of an unjust state system are enforcing. We tried our best to make a beautiful place in this world and when it wasn’t working out, when all a landlord had to do was act decently, to do the bare minimum and not exacerbate an already dire financial situation, they did the opposite and they involved a predatory collection agency in the mix. The labor of love and the time spent building and operating the JRM was all well spent, there is not a single regret. But this punitive and unwieldy bill is not fair, it’s not even humane. And due to the corrupt legal/financial system, it’s completely "legal" for them.

Please donate what you can and please also share widely.