After 5 years of operation we finally have a new home!
For the past 5 years, Revolutionary Fitness has been providing free and low cost health and fitness services/education throughout various underdeveloped communities in NYC. Founded by a group of fitness trainers, our goal is to provide the people from the neighborhoods we come from with knowledge on how to better their health conditions through conscious decision-making when it comes to food choices and physical training.
Volunteers who have donated their time and skills to teach fitness classes out of local parks and community centers have provided to this effort. Our volunteers continue to spend countless hours developing curriculum for educational courses, with teachings specific to the needs of our community. Hours of artistic contributions in the form of graphic design, blogging, and podcasting have all been made possible through the hard work and dedication made by these individuals. The Revolutionary Fitness event planners have reached numerous community based organizations around the city. It has been an extremely rewarding journey and now we are ready to enter into the next phase.
In the past two years RevFit has been tirelessly searching and negotiating for our own physical space to centralize our efforts. We were searching for potential spaces in the South Bronx, Harlem and the Uptown area, some of the neighborhoods who are facing the toughest health conditions in NYC. The process has been exhausting and even grueling at times. Not to mention the insurmountable financial expense. We have been in nearly half a dozen contract negotiations with landlords, paid for lawyers and brokers fees out of pocket. We have spent tons of hours and energy trying to find a space that our community could call home. Time and time again we have run into landlords who either is over pricing their spaces or were asking for us to invest a lot of money to renovate the space with horrible lease renewal options. This is nothing short of a reflection on the massive gentrification-taking place in our communities. A few months back we started switching our orientation and joined our long time allies of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and Justice First, in an effort to find a shared space for our community organizations.
I'm excited to announce that we have finally negotiated a fair lease on a space and will be launching our services there this summer! The space is on the corner of 116th street and Park Avenue in East Harlem! A very convenient location, easily accessible by public transportation and only one block away from the 6 train, central for all the neighborhoods we serve around town. We will finally be offering a full array of daily fitness classes, weekly educational courses and employment opportunities for community members. The space will be a hub for our fitness justice work and the vital social activism provided by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and Justice First.
But now comes the hard part, where we need everyone's help. Our new humble home is in barebones condition and needs significant renovations and equipment installation. As many of you know RevFit (as well as A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition & Justice First) are grass roots organizations that operate on the small financial contributions our community provides, we have no big funders and aim to stay true to our mission by providing low cost services. Most of the money we have been able to accumulate over the years is going towards our securing of the center. I would also add, our founding leadership team is investing thousands of dollars of our own personal savings to this effort as well. In order to be able to afford the basic financial needs of the space we will be launching an IndieGoGo campaign in a few weeks. Our expenses for the initial opening and to support our first few months of operations totals out to a minimum of $24,000 just for renovations, monthly bills and our initial equipment order. We hope folks can make whatever contribution possible to this fundraiser and spread the word to their contacts.
We also will need help over the next month or two with physical renovations and equipment transport for the space. We will be making appeals to community members over the next few weeks to plug into this effort as well.
There is still a lot of hard work to be done over the next few months but we are extremely excited that we are very close to opening the first real Fitness Justice space of its kind. A community space that provides low cost specialized fitness services, a community space that provides low cost health and fitness education to empower our community and create job opportunities, a community space to manage our multimedia efforts to provide free content online for all to access, a community space that will hopefully help with the creation of even more Revolutionary Fitness branches around the country. We hope you join us in this journey and let's continue to move together.