Magda turned four the weekend we built her family's home.
Earlier that month, her parents had asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She said one word. "Casa." (Spanish for "home")
By Sunday morning, she had one.
A weekend that did not feel like a weekend
I went down to Baja from April 24 to April 26 with The Impact MVMT, the nonprofit that coordinates these builds. A coworker had volunteered with them on a previous trip and talked about it the way people talk about something that quietly reset them. When registration opened, I signed up before I had time to overthink it.
I did not know a single person on the trip.
Friday morning, the group met in San Diego, about ninety minutes from Newport Beach, and we piled into a van together. The drive south is calm and well-paved, two and a half hours from the border to a small town called Maneadero, just past Ensenada. By lunchtime we were on the build site. By 1 p.m. we were working.
We stayed in a beach house the organization runs in a gated community a short bus ride from the site. Bunks, a full kitchen, big open rooms built for the kind of conversation that happens when a group of strangers spends three days swinging hammers together. The weekend, lodging, every meal from Friday lunch to Sunday breakfast, building materials, transportation, runs $350 per person. That number sits with you once you see what it actually does.
Meet the Guzmán Ramos family
Zulma is 29. Jesús is 30. Their daughters are Genesis, who is five, and Magda, who turned four that Saturday.
Zulma teaches at a local orphanage. Jesús works caring for dogs. They moved to Maneadero a few years ago looking for stability and a future for their girls. They saved. They bought a piece of land of their own and have been making payments on it ever since. Before this weekend, the four of them had been living in a small spare room inside the church where Zulma works. For more than a year and a half.
They were not the recipients of charity in any version of this story I want to tell. They were already doing the work. They had already saved, already bought the land, already shown up for their daughters in ways most of us would find quietly extraordinary. The Impact MVMT did not rescue them. The Impact MVMT met them where they already were and built a roof over the rest.
What can be built in three days
We built the home from the ground up. The concrete foundation had been poured before we arrived, and from there everything you would associate with a house, we put in by hand. Framing the walls. Anchoring them to the slab. Windows. Roof. I helped install a second-floor window. I worked alongside the electrician on outlets and lights. I climbed up and helped secure shingles. I hung drywall, prepped it, painted. I sat on the ground with Genesis and Magda and we drew on cardboard and laughed at jokes I did not fully understand and did not need to.
The house came in around 600 square feet. Two bedrooms, a loft, insulation, drywall, electrical, windows, a roof. Before we revealed it, we installed a refrigerator and stocked it with groceries.
On Saturday night, the team threw Magda a birthday party on the build site. There was a piñata. There was cake. There was a four-year-old in a small dress, swinging a stick at the sky, surrounded by people who had been strangers to her 36 hours earlier.
She got the home.
The moment I keep coming back to
Sunday morning, just before we revealed the house, one of the team leads named Brandon pulled the family aside and told them something the rest of us had not known he was going to say. The volunteers had collectively donated everything inside the home. And he, personally, was paying off the rest of what they owed on the land.
I do not know how to write the next sentence in a way that does not flatten what happened. They wept. Jesús wept. Zulma wept. The girls did not fully understand and were hugging anyone who would hold still. The people who had spent the weekend building the walls were standing there crying too, holding paint-stained hands.
What hit me was the size of their gratitude for a home that, by any measure, is humble. A two-bedroom, 600-square-foot house on a piece of land they had been making payments on for years. To this family, that house was everything.
Maribel Hernandez, who co-founded the organization with Denise Serrano, told me about a family she had helped more than ten years ago, and how she still keeps in touch with them. She talked about what a safe place to sleep had done for those kids over time. The grades. The confidence. The steadiness. That is the part that quietly does the most work. A wall, a roof, a door that locks, repeated across a childhood. It compounds.
Why this work matters to me
A home is not really a transaction. It is safety. It is dignity. It is the place where a child gets to feel steady enough to grow into who they are going to be. That is true in coastal Orange County, and it is true three hours south, and it is the only definition of home that has ever made sense to me.
My work here, in Newport Beach and along the rest of the coast, is what makes this part of my life possible. A portion of every commission I earn now goes to The Impact MVMT. Some of it will support the staff who keep the lights on. Some will fund builds. Some will go to whatever is most pressing when I cut the next check. The clients I am lucky enough to work with are part of that, quietly, by trusting me with one of the biggest decisions of their lives. That trust does not stop at our coastline.
Three ways to be part of it
If something in you tugged while reading this, here are the simplest ways to help.
Join the next build. September 11 to 13, 2026. Three days, $350, the same calm drive south, a different family who is already doing the work. If you would like to come, reach out and I will make the introduction directly.
Donate to The Impact MVMT. Direct support for builds, staff, and operations is available at theimpactmvmt.org.
Sponsor a student or contribute to a future build. The organization runs an education sponsorship program where you can follow a specific child's progress, and accepts contributions toward upcoming homes. Both are at theimpactmvmt.org/about-us.
I came home a little quieter than I left. I am still figuring out exactly what to do with that. For now, I am putting my hands and a piece of my income against something bigger than any single weekend, and grateful, in a way that is hard to write down, for the chance to be small inside it.
— Jade
