Detroit Kitchen Connect
THE REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF DETROIT KITCHEN CONNECT
Empowered Participation / Edge Effect Abundance / Honors Community & Place
Empowered Participation / Edge Effect Abundance / Honors Community & Place
Photos left to right: Molly O'Meara of Beau Bien Fine Foods; 2013 FoodLab BASE Graduation; Tabla Coulibaly of Health Living-Raw
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Jess Daniel, Executive Director of FoodLab Detroit and a BALLE Local Economy Fellow, tells the story of Kitchen Connect.
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Tawnya Clark of the
Batata Shop |
When I first moved to Detroit in 2010 I knew that the best way to meet people would be through food. So I started a popup restaurant called Neighborhood Noodle to meet people in the food and agriculture movement in Detroit.
I saw a lot of excitement and energy around the food businesses, but not a lot of places to convene and develop business ideas and learn from one another. FoodLab came out of seven people sitting around a kitchen table; it emerged organically. As our numbers grew and our intentions of what we wanted to do together, the organizational structure grew as well. One of the things we created was BASE, our 12-week workshop for good food businesses. We realized we needed access to commercial kitchen space and found it too difficult to do informally. So that is how we started Kitchen Connect. We started up Kitchen Connect in July 2013, a collaboration among FoodLab, the Eastern Market Corporation, and two licensed kitchen partners–one a church and one a community organization. United Way of Southeast Michigan provided a $10,000 grant for the initial program design and launching, and then subsequently the McGregor Foundation has contributed $50,000 in ongoing support. 
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April Anderson of
Good Cakes and Bakes |
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What makes Kitchen Connect different from others around the country is that we are using existing kitchens that are underutilized. They were only being used two or three hours a week for homeless feeding and Head Start lunch programs. So not only are we taking advantage of existing resources but also the social relationships those kitchens already have, or hope to have, with the neighborhood. For instance the Church of St. Peter and Paul is an Eastern Orthodox Church founded by Polish immigrants. Over the last 50 years the church community has dwindled and the neighborhood is now mostly Spanish speaking. So the current congregation that is left has been thinking of how can we create programming to make stronger connections with this changing demographic. And they found food a very powerful way to do it.
We have three tiers of fees that we charge to the business owners: a scholarship rate, an at-cost rate, and a market rate. We mostly work with folks who do want to eventually grow their business and graduate from the kitchen into their own space. Our hopes are some of these people will graduate from scholarship rate to the market rate. But we also work with folks for whom the work will always be supplemental, and given that we are very interested in targeting low-income entrepreneurs in the neighborhood we do expect to be offering subsidies on an ongoing basis. Still we are also constantly looking to balance our subsidized with our nonsubsidized clients. In Detroit we have a lot of folks in the very near suburbs who have more disposable income and more capital and want to start up food businesses. So we are exploring how we can draw in more of those people as well as existing restaurateurs who want to test out new products. 
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Our collaborations have happened almost by accident. In one of the kitchens it turned out that most of the clients were bakers and so they started organizing meetups about their businesses. Now they are also having conversations around things like, we are all interested in organic flour, can we do joint purchasing?
We are also learning from what is going on in Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids; we try to build collaborativeness into everything we do. We heard from a number of folks in Michigan and Ohio who were interested in starting similar shared kitchens or kitchen networks, so we started to convene a quarterly meeting so we could share resources and knowledge. 
Detroit Cooks, a collective of six FoodLab businesses.
Kitchen Connect and food businesses in Detroit are igniting entrepreneurship among all different sorts of people. Food is the go-to for jump-starting community and economic development initiatives. We now have a number of FoodLab members who are looking at other underutilized space in the city. Not just kitchens, but storefronts that give them a place to test out their businesses in a community or neighborhood.
There is a lot of collaboration between food and the other creative industries–artists/graphic designers and the “makers”/small-scale manufacturers. For example there is Shinola, a new bicycle and watch manufacturer in Detroit that has collaborated with a juice company DROUGHT and brought in 6 or 7 other local food businesses to sell their products in their retail space. In other parts of the country the local manufacturing movement is jumpstarted by food businesses. People see food can be made in a place, why not make laptop stands or jeans? 
I think there are two answers to what is going on in the food movement in Detroit today. One is about a certain demographic of my generation and one is about where Detroit finds itself today. In terms of food and my generation we see a move toward purchasing specialty artisanal products where you know the story. People are more and more interested in feeling connected to the things they are consuming and understanding where they come from. In part, that’s because people are more obsessed about cultivating their individual identity, with making a statement about themselves through what they consume. It’s all about, “who am I and what does what I eat say about who I am?” That can be very positive: “I am eating things that are good for the environment and future generations. I am eating things that protect the livelihoods of my neighbors.”
So many questions relating to that are about food access and how food impacts public health. So in the current moment, it looks like tension: should we promote and celebrate local, small, sustainable growers, farmers markets, CSAs because we like what they stand for, even if they aren’t available or sensible options for many people? And the flip side: does that mean we look down on people who take a bus to Walmart to shop for fruits and vegetables for their families?
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Herman Hayes of
Dilla's Delights |
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I think it would have been very easy to create something akin to the Brooklyn culture here --which is focused more on the self-referential aspects of food – but at FoodLab we try our best to be more inclusive. We do that through things that seem simple and obvious, like recognizing that people don’t have access to easy transportation. So we ask, how can we promote ride-sharing and make sure our meetings are nearer where people live? We not only publicize events on social media but call people on the phone or text or distribute flyers. And as we cultivate leadership, we actively look to diversity. It takes intention and action. It doesn’t just happen automatically.
One of the other ways that happens is by cultivating relationships with partners who already have relationships with the Detroit communities we don’t know as well. It takes persistence; 
FoodLab would never have become what it is today if we did not sit at the back of meetings and listened when people said they didn’t want to work with us because we were white hipsters. But we continued to show up. Over time I think that made a difference.
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Jess visiting Pete Salgado at his wheelchair-accessible kitchen.
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A Food for Thought Conversation in May 2012 on Cooptition (collaborative competition)
I think we are also willing to have honest conversations with our members about where we’re at right now. For instance our steering committee of ten are mostly African American women. And yes most of the food entrepreneurs are women. But we asked ourselves what would it mean to try to recruit more men into the fold (many of the larger, more established specialty food businesses in Detroit are led by white men), and why might that be important? We also have candid conversations around how can we be fierce and talk about racial equity and entrepreneurship without alienating members who are not used to having those conversations. 
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FoodLab BASE 2013
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To talk as moms or as neighbors living together in a neighborhood. We are building trust. It is not just about being a business owner. I've been especially inspired in this area lately by conversations we've been having around economic justice and Prosperity for All as part of BALLE's Local Economy Fellowship.
Last year there were three food businesses owners that participated in our BASE workshops. One who had recently moved from Brooklyn and the others were long time residents, one of whom is a white woman who has lived in Detroit for over 35 years and another an African American woman who has been looking for kitchen space for 30 years with no success. 
The three of them joined forces and and recruited others. We connected them with a kitchen that had space and they created a seven-member collective called Detroit Cooks. All their businesses now operate out of that shared space, they market their goods and services together, and they’ve become a support group for one another through things like the licensing process.
FoodLab's ecosystem amoeba
On the wall at FoodLab we have an illustration of an amoeba that depicts the work we do; we are always trying to operate on the edge. I am a doctoral student and my focus is on social networks and movement building. 
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News about Detroit Kitchen Connect:
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I don’t think there’s a how-to guide yet for starting up a distributed kitchen network like Kitchen Connect, but if you are interested in replicating this model, I recommend starting out with talking with and assessing the actual needs of entrepreneurs in your place, reaching out to and visiting other kitchen incubators in your region (a quick internet search will help you find them), developing a solid business plan, and only then, once you’ve started the planning and due diligence, reach out to potential kitchen partners when you’re more clear about what you’re looking for.
(Do their mission and values align with yours? How many hours per week should the kitchen be available? What equipment is necessary, what can you buy? Will you need to pay them rent / utilities?) If you want to grow a community like FoodLab in your place, you might start off by looking around to see what groups, venues, and informal networks already exist where food entrepreneurs are connecting. BALLE has a great guide to starting a local business network. To promote inclusivity and diversity, first make this an active intention; pay attention to who you lift up as spokesperson of your group, what issues you choose to focus on and how you communicate them, 
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Jess Daniel and Devita Davison
If you have questions about Kitchen Connect contact:
Jess Daniel at [email protected] and Devita Davison at [email protected]. Go to our Meetup Calendar for an upcoming opportunity to hear Jess Daniel speak in person. Share your comments on DETROIT KITCHEN CONNECT here: |