Save Requiem Cafe

Hello, friends near and far,

This is Kris Irons, the owner of Requiem Cafe in Anaheim, California.

Requiem Cafe is in dire need of aid. Our landlords slapped us with a $18,700 erroneous withdrawal that hit our bank account with no notice and compiled with other fees to make almost $50,000 in charges between July and August. Requiem currently survives and thrives based on the periodic collaborations we host — a model that is made necessary because of the other actions the landlord has taken like allowing our storefront to be blocked by a parklet and violating our exclusivity agreement by leasing to other coffee shops in the area. This massive expense between collaboration periods of Requiem is a huge blow and challenge for us to overcome.

This unusual circumstance puts us at risk of not being able to pay bills or make payroll, which puts the continued existence of Requiem and all it means to the community at risk of shutting down.

This is a very real emergency with a very real clock attached. If Requiem shuts down, our staff will suffer, and our regulars will suffer. The queer community will lose one of the few safe spaces it has. And all in the name of capitalism. It is imperative that we rebuild the unexpected expenses taken from us by our landlords and have the bandwidth to fight to get it back. Anything we are able to fundraise beyond that will go back into Requiem, ensuring its survival for more years to come.

Please, help us keep our doors open. We have so many exciting things planned for the rest of the year, and we want to be able to share them with you. Many need Requiem, and Requiem needs you now more than ever.

FAQ

In the immediate, money raised will go toward helping Requiem pay its bills for the rest of August. Requiem, by necessity, relies on our collaborations to function as a business. In collaboration periods, we make enough money to weather surprise expenses like this. In between them, it's more challenging

Additional funds raised will help us do anything necessary involving legal fees to draft notice letters and confront the landlords to recoup this money, get an audit on the CAM fees charged to us, and also to confront them about much bigger and more grievous issues (such as violations of our exclusivity).

Essentially this:

On 7/31 an automatic payment was processed to withdraw money from our account. This was demonstrably erroneous but can't be fixed until September which will be too late. We ran the numbers and predicted because we don't have a collaboration in August we'd come up short on our payrolls this month. We wanted to do a GoFundMe as a last resort but we really don't want our staff to have to worry about making it through the month. They also claim they undercharged us for "CAM fees" for the last several years and are adding that to our rent fees and that will require auditing them to figure out.

The other issues like exclusivity have been going on for years and it's high time we resolve that issue because recouping the losses from that would be astronomical.

Even getting to the point of doing a lawsuit takes money and we have to make sure our employees and standing bills are handled first and foremost. For instance, this is how much I was quoted to write the initial basic letter to the LL to get the money back. That's an EXPENSIVE letterhead.

Unfortunately, often times the only real winners in lawsuits are the lawyers. Still, given that the violations of exclusivity and other actions taken by the landlord (like allowing the parklet to infringe on our storefront). We have been and are confronting the landlord regularly and demanding to be made whole for these issues and will go the legal route if need be because it has been reviewed and the case is pretty straight forward.

We have the case; it just takes resources to get this going.

Thankfully seeing all this community support is amazing! The dream scenario is we just get through this month and resolve these issues and get a buffer against any future issues so we can focus on improvements and collaborations to be the best cozy fantasy world escape we can be!

Thank you so much to everyone for the support and standing with us!