interviews
EAT OFFBEAT
by Manal Kahi
June 15, 2019
This interview with Manal Kahi, co-founder and CEO of EAT OFFBEAT, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
EAT OFFBEAT is a New York City based catering company that works exclusively with refugees.
How did you get started on this work? I know the crux of the business is in hiring refugees, are there particular guidelines about who qualifies as a refugee?
Manal: We're a catering company. We deliver authentic meals that are entirely conceived, prepared, and delivered by refugees here in New York City. Basically the model is we hire talented refugees who are looking to be in the food industry.
They happen to be with the UNHCR, they happen to be refugees by status – but they are chefs by nature.
We train them, for those who haven't had a professional culinary training or haven't had experience working in profession kitchens – we train them so they become profession chefs, we help them scale their recipes and then we deliver their dishes. It's the way they make it at home but they prepare it at our commercial kitchen and we deliver that to mostly offices and private parties or events all over New York City.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
Does hiring a refugee have any complications or benefits?
Manal: Complications? Not necessarily. They are usually referred to us by the IRC, the International Rescue Committee, and maybe that's a good place to answer your question of how we decide they're refugees.
We have a partnership with the IRC, which is one of nine resettlement agencies in the U.S. They help refugees. They help them even before coming here, they provide assistance to refugees filing for refugee status back home.
And once someone is approved they go through the very lengthy security process. They get to the U.S. and the IRC is mandated by the government to assist them in the settlement process. That includes picking them up at the airport, finding accommodations. Part of the assistance they provide is also finding jobs or employment and this is where we come in. Whenever we're hiring they send us candidates who are looking for a job who are recently resettled or who simply just want to be in the food industry. And that's how we hire.
So to answer your question on definition of who is a refugee for us, it's really whoever gets referred to us by the IRC.
Are you hiring full-time or part-time?
Manal: There's a good mix of both. It's a blend. Anyone who's a chef, who has items on the menu, who is contributing to the menu, that's a full-time position, because we need that chef to be at the kitchen whenever we get an order. We have a few positions that are more part-time.
How many people are you working with at the moment?
Manal: We're close to thirty people day to day.
Wow.
Manal: And that includes every function. That's chefs, sous chefs, delivery operators, customer service, everything all together. And it's a mix of refugees but also a couple of Americans. Especially on administrative functions.
Are you looking to expand beyond New York City?
Manal: Not necessarily and definitely not right now. We would never say "Never", that might happen an some point but for now our focus is really on New York City alone.
Are you set up as a for-profit business or a 501c3?
Manal: We are a for-profit business.
Do you feel like you're mission driven?
Manal: We are definitely mission driven. Definitely heavily mission driven. It's what guides us, it's what defines us, and it's part of who we are. At the same time we see ourselves as a food company first, we are definitely food centric, we're people centric, and the mission is very heavy. But it's very important that we are making money because that's the only way we can actually achieve our mission and keep hiring people and keep paying them decent wages.
Business is super important but for us it doesn't makes sense unless there is the social mission part attached.
Can you tell me a little bit about your own background?
Manal: I'm originally from Lebanon. I came here as a graduate student in 2013. My background was in environmental management. My goal was to go a bit more into international climate affairs. I was working on climate affairs in the Middle East and I wanted to go international. That's part of why I chose to come to New York, to be close to the U.N., multi-national institutions or organizations. And then when I came here, I was a bit disappointed with hummus in grocery stores –
I heard.
Manal: So that's really what sparked the idea initially. I started making my own. I got my grandmothers recipe and when that became successful here we thought why not commercialize it.
The first step was the hummus, the next step was...
Manal: Exactly the first step was the hummus and clearly the idea was not just make hummus and sell it, it was initially to have it made by refugees here who were being resettled here in New York City who wanted to share their hummus recipes with the rest of New York and commercialize that. That was really the idea early on. Then after that we went to studying the market, looking at the idea and we thought it was much better to go global. We though why not open it to any refugees coming from all over the world and discover these recipes that, just like hummus, are so much better when their homemade or made by someone who knows how it should taste.
We hire based on talent and passion for food regardless of where people come from, but so far it's been very diverse.
Do you think that it's hard for refugees to find work placement?
Manal: From what I see, my own personal opinion, it's different when you're an immigrant versus when you're a refugee. The only difference is, mainly when you're an immigrant you made the choice yourself, so very often you would have taken English classes, you made the choice as to where to go and when to go and why to go. But when you're here as a refugee very often you actually had to.
And why that makes it a bit harder is because when you come as an immigrant, when it's you're own choice, you may have come as a student, you have a bit more leeway and a bit more time to give it more consideration and decide whether you're going to go and what you're going to do exactly. Whereas if you come as refugee very often you just have to flee and you have to make it work with whatever.
I wouldn't say it's extremely hard to find a job. Jobs are available. It's similar to anyone who's looking for a job. It is definitely much harder to find a job that is a decent wage and a good job that makes you proud and that brings your dignity back – because very often you don't have transferable skills, you probably don't speak the language, so if you had training as an accountant before coming here it's much much harder to find a job as an accountant than to find a job at something else you're not necessarily passionate about.
Is there anything you've learned in the process of working with refugees about the refugee process?
Manal: One thing we've learned is that simply by providing a work environment and an atmosphere where people form a community, and they help each other even indirectly by being part of that kitchen and part of that community, people start to integrate and adjust and get adapted to their new lives much easier than when they're isolated and do not have a supportive community around them.
I see it happening in our kitchen.
I see a very high level of resilience that I think is notable and particular. All of our chefs, you can just see it, they're ready to do whatever it takes to succeed and they're very committed to the work they are doing. They are also very adaptable. Whenever we have a problem, something going wrong, everyone is very involved in the work and passionate about it and finds a solution. I think there's that added characteristic that is very common among everyone who's on our team.
What are your goals moving forward?
Manal: We have three goals. The first is to provide quality jobs to talented refugees who want to be in the food industry. The second is more about New Yorkers – it's about introducing New Yorkers to this menu and off the beaten path cuisines and somehow connect them, build bridges, between them eating our food at their homes or offices and us cooking in the kitchen. And the third ultimately is about changing the narrative around refugees, showcasing a different and more positive story.
What do you think the current narrative is around refugees?
Manal: That's a good question. Very often the narrative is around a more negative rhetoric, "they are stealing our jobs, not contributing to the economy, taking resources away." Or if it's positive it's all about how vulnerable the community is and how they always need charity, they always need help. Those are two concepts we are trying to change or at least provide one example where it's not necessarily the case, and we really push our customers to shift perspectives a bit, change perspectives a bit. Because in our case we refugees, we immigrants, are actually helping New Yorkers discover something new. It's all about shifting the table on that.
We're a 'for profit' we're not a 'non-profit'. Part of that is to show our chefs are contributing to the economy. They are contributing to making a richer food scene here in New York. They're active contributors to the economy. They're adding value. They're bringing value. And that's the other thing we want to highlight. They're not relying on charity, they're not taking they are contributing, they're paying their taxes.
The narrative becomes less about pity and charity and more about contribution and resilience.
Manal: Exactly!
Seeing people for who they are and what they have to bring rather than the status they came with.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
interviews
In Conversation with Dalila Rodriguez of Children's Institute, Inc.
by Dalila Rodriguez
June 25, 2018
This interview with Dalila Rodriguez, the educational manager at CII, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Would you start by introducing yourself?
I'm the education manager at CII. Once upon a time, I was a home visitor and then moved my way into a site supervisor position and was there for a couple of years. Now I'm the education manager. I have moved away from being the administrator over programs and getting that one-on-one face-to-face with families like I did back then. My role is to support staff development and to improve the quality of the services that we provide in all aspects, so curriculum and teaching instruction.
What are the services you provide and who are you serving?
We provide early childhood services educational programs for children and families, birth to five. We have a multitude of programs. One of them, for example, is our home-based program. Our home visitors go into the homes for families, we call that Early Head Start. We start with mothers that are pregnant and then up until three years old. So about 2.6, they transition into a center-based program.
Then we have our center-based programs, which we have from birth to five years of age. Those are called Early Head Start and Head Start center-based programs. We have also programs that are solely funded by the state of California. Those are pre-K programs. We serve about 2,000 children in the community approximately.
Within our Head Start framework, it's a comprehensive program. It's not just educational-based services, but rather it looks at the entire family unit. We know that at that early age, in early intervention programs we want to make sure that we're addressing the entire family. There's someone whose sole role is to work with the families to find out what their goals are as a family.
Then it's the family community partnership team's role and responsibility to build partnerships in the community where we can get resources that are going to support that family. We actually have parents that have finished school, finished their degrees, and work for our agency now, which is amazing to know that, wow, this parent started coming in and asking for help for their child but ended up getting support for themselves, too. We also have a health department. We have a registered nurse on staff as well as a consultant.
We also have our mental health managers. We have a mental health component and we have specialists that go out to the sites. The teacher identifies that there may be a concern with the child experiencing some type of stress or trauma, atypical behavior. They'll write out a referral, they'll send it out to the team. The team goes out and observes the child and then identifies if they qualify for early intervention or if it is a disability ... usually it's both. We all work together: education, disabilities, and mental health. We call it the dream team. All of them have a role in observing on different days and times to see the child's behavior and to make sure that from the education lens, the teacher doing everything they're supposed to be doing to make sure that this child has the environment and the experiences that they need to be successful in the classroom.
Wow. That's a lot. Let's take a step back, can you specific "community" and who you serve?
The Los Angeles population. We concentrate our services to the highest need communities, so for example, our highest concentration of Head Start programs from three to five are in the South Los Angeles area. Our main office is right on Figueroa and Florence. All of the schools, we have about 20+ schools that are within a five mile radius of that center. We have schools in our housing developments over at Nickerson Gardens, Imperial, Avalon.
Are you in Jordan Downs as well?
We're in Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts, Nickerson, Avalon. Yes, we're in all of them. We're also in the South Vermont Green Meadows area, so on the other side of the 110 Freeway. We go as far as Western. That's about as far as we go. The best way I could gauge it is about a five mile radius. We have services out in Compton as well.
What percentage of the kids you're working with are dealing with a parent who's incarcerated?
Percentage-wise, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I could ask our family community partnership specialist because during enrollment, those are some of the things that they may or may not disclose.
It's not something we really quantify where we're like, "Oh, this many children have this many parents incarcerated." It's not something we track to a certain extent.
How do you engage with children who are dealing with trauma?
It's very case-by-case. Basically the way it goes is if the teacher identifies or the home visitor identifies there's something happening here that's not typical, they'll reach out to their mental health specialist. The mental health specialist observes and then from there, we have to have consent. A lot of the barriers we find is obtaining consent.
That's one of the areas we're working on currently. Our mental health manager and FCP manager just got a grant to do some work with families around that. We just started that journey recently. Let's say they do sign the consent and we do get that acknowledgement from the parents, the mental health specialist and the education team that is working with that child go in to provide some early intervention support for the teacher in the classroom first. Step one will be to set up some classroom strategies that are going to help support that child. Right now what we're working on is in implementing a new social emotional curriculum. It's called Conscious Discipline, which is an adult first approach. Something we've noticed too is that teachers are not equipped.
When I went to school, no one told me this is something that you could potentially experience and here are the strategies for you to use in the situation. It's very much the education component and not as much like these are children that ... these are some of the common things you'll see when you see a child that is experiencing stress or trauma. You really learn as you go.
Part of the adult first model is really helping them cope first. Practicing relaxation exercises, how to breathe, how to channel some of your positive energy into that child, and then be able to understand also what is happening in that child's physiological state.
We've been learning a lot about brain development and what trauma causes to the brain. We call it QTIP, Quit Taking it Personal. It's not about you, it's about what's happening to this child. We're supporting teachers and learning how to first cope with that. Then what you transpire or what you're feeling, you're going to emanate. You're going to transfer that to the child. Our goal is to calm them, so how do we calm ourselves first and then approach?
We work on setting a plan with the family. The teacher, the family, the administration, the specialist all get together and have a multidisciplinary team meeting. We acknowledge the parent for whatever things that are happening in the home. Sometimes the home and the school can be very different. It could be that they're great at school and then at home, the parent is really not able to know how to work with the child, or vice versa.
There are times when we refer to our overall CII mental health program, which are more intensive therapies like Parent Child Interactive Therapy. PCIT. The Parent Child Interactive Therapy program is one of the ones that we refer to the most. Again, it's parent-centered, so it's focusing on the parent's role and how they interact with the child.
How does CII decide where there needs to be a physical presence?
The CII's overall mission has always been to work with children and families that have been impacted by some sort of trauma, violence, things that are happening in the community. We acquired the grants over in the Watts/South Los Angeles area about four years ago.
Head Start has very rigorous requirements that we have to follow. Sometimes agencies do not keep up to par with what the Office of Head Start requires.
What is the Office of Head Start?
The Office of Head Start is the grant that we acquire from the federal government. This is how we get the money to offer the services that we provide.
Is everything is government funded here?
Not everything, but mostly. Most of it comes from the Office of Head Start, which is a federally funded government program. That's a nationwide program. We also have state funding, which is the California Department of Ed. For example, this school is a state funded school. They're solely state funded.
Are the national and state guidelines different or at all contradictory?
They're not necessarily contradictory. They're different in the sense that they don't have the comprehensive component. Early Head Start and Head Start that come from the federal government require the comprehensive model.
And the state does not require that.
The state funded programs are more modeled towards families who are experiencing poverty, but are working and/or are going to school, so they qualify for these services. They're still families experiencing poverty. With Head Start, what we find, is that it's more intergenerational poverty where they are not coming out of that cycle. With State funded, we see that they're more young parents that are wanting to go to school but cannot afford childcare. There are immigrant families that have come here and are having trouble finding work, or they may work but they're not making very much. They're making minimum wage.
Are there guidelines where you are dealing with immigrant families?
No. At this point, we don't ask for immigration status. In terms of second language learners, for example, this population here Mid-Wilshire and Otis Booth, this location is highly Korean. They are also coming in with ESL, second language needs. They're also experiencing the same types of immigration issues and poverty issues that all of our Hispanic families are. It's just that we have to modify in terms of language and making sure that we have translation and things like that available for them.
One of the things that I know our family community partnership team has been working on is doing workshops and informationals at parent meetings regarding immigration.
We know our families are experiencing things that are beyond even our comprehension. When you hear the things that happen, it's just like, "Okay. Wow. Where do we start?" I know that's going to be one of the things we're going to see. I know from experience with knowing families that your automatic instinct is don't call the police. Don't go to certain events. Don't go to these things because then you just don't know. Now, with the whole separation of families, who knows what ... That's just an added layer of fear. Fortunately, I feel like we've built a good rapport with the community that we've been working with to support them in still coming to us. It seems like they're still bringing their children to school.
Part of the work that we're doing is trying to really let families know how much more we have to offer because of the type of funding that we have. That we're not just focused on the child's education, we're focused on the whole family's success as a family unit and getting them out of poverty and trying to support the steps that they need to do that. If they've experienced trauma, then getting them the tools and the resources that they need to be able to not only help their child but to help themselves to overcome.
What do you feel is CII's most urgent work?
One of the overall common trends amongst families is wanting the best for their child and wanting to learn how to support their child through the educational system or understanding development and milestones. For us, we have this window of opportunity to get the families in and build trust with them so that they know that we have their child's best interest in mind. While we will get to the educational pieces, we know coming in as an agency that understands trauma, that we're not going to get to the educational pieces now.
Part of the early childhood services side is really helping parents understand development and understand how the environment in the family impacts their child. We can't get them to write their name until we can help them self-regulate and sit in a chair. If your child is still running rampant in the classroom, they're not really ready to learn how to do one plus one, or know their shapes, or know their colors because there's something happening.
Educating the family is our highest priority in terms of really supporting them as educators and advocating for them to say, "Okay, I understand what is good for my child. I understand that learning in terms of academia will come when I have the foundational pieces in place."
Do you feel like CII is on the right path in the way you're working with these families?
Taking a look at our data is very important to us and really analyzing it and understanding what it's telling us so that we know whether or not we're on the right track and what different things we can do to approach it. We can make assumptions all we want, but at the end of the day, what type of data do we have to support that? As of now, it seems like we're on the right track.
Some work we're doing this year is really getting teachers more trauma informed-style trainings that are going to help them understand the process of trauma. What to look for and how to understand it and then build some empathy around it so that they can cope. Then they can do their best to support that child and their family. It's all around understanding the brain. They call it the survival state, the emotional state, and the executive state. They're all pieces of the brain and how they work and how they work when under stress, when under trauma. Then how do we get to the executive functioning? It's really interesting work. I love the adult first approach to it.