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Pike’s Peak Pride This Weekend!
Preparing for Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day (August 21)
A Message from RCWF
Hi, we’re the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. While most of you got to know (and support) us through our pandemic relief work, we launched in 2018 with the goal of making the hospitality industry safer and more equitable for workers. And our founders chose to build RWCF on the community foundation model. This month, before we gear up for grant-making and fundraising campaigns, we thought we’d take a minute to reintroduce ourselves and our core mission.
What is a community foundation?
A community foundation is a nonprofit that’s focused on community issues, in our case the restaurant industry. While most community foundations are centered on geography, RWCF is America’s first nonprofit using the community foundation model to support people in a particular labor segment. We are a community dedicated to making hospitality more hospitable to everyone.
One of the key tools community foundations use to make change is through permanent funds (like our Racial Justice Fund (https://www.restaurantworkerscf.org/racial-justice-fund) and Crisis Relief Fund) (https://secure.restaurantworkerscf.org/np/clients/restaurantworkerscf/donation.jsp?campaign=19&forwardedFromSecureDomain=1&test=true) . We also grant money to like-minded organizations big and small. We help nonprofits build capacity. We find hyper-local and niche efforts worth investing in, and we create an ecosystem of change-makers, whose work is stronger together. That community integration and connectedness is why the community foundation model works best for us and is much more reliable in the long term.
Where does your money go?
The funds we raise go to our own community-building and advocacy efforts, grant-making to support other nonprofits (in our various program areas) and to an impact investing fund, with which we aim to positively affect worker rights in the industry.
We hope we’ve given you a clearer idea of how we operate at RWCF, and why we focus on long term support for not only our grantees and recipients of aid, but also our own! The longer we get to stay around, the more continued focus we can have on the things we fight for.
We’d like to give a huge shoutout to our grantee https://oaklandbloom.org/Oakland Bloom for being included in winning the James Beard Emerging Leadership Award! Oakland Bloom is a non-profit organization that empowers working class immigrants, refugees and other chefs of color to start their own food businesses built with equitable finance models to combat the historically exploitative nature of the industry.
Together with 8th Street Collective they’ve developed Understory Oakland (https://understoryoakland.com/) , an eatery with a worker-led model that works to empower restaurant workers through project support, training and economic opportunity. It’s a dream to support an organization that is doing great work, and it’s icing on the cake to see them recognized by the James Beard Foundation. Again, congratulations to Oakland Bloom!
Have a safe and wonderful weekend!