Mandela Partners is working to fill the gap created through deeply rooted inequities - like a challenging local food environment, a legacy of redlining and economic disinvestment.

We source some of our produce through Mandela Partner’s food hub, which builds economic power for small, family farms through direct distribution to local restaurants. We offer paid internships for the Mandela Partners Culinary Training Program, which provides a pathway to work for people navigating barriers to employment, like immigration or former incarceration.

We love the community directed programming Mandela Partners is doing - so we are annual sponsors. You can help contribute too by sharing or contributing to our fundraiser this week.

Since 1975, La Peña Cultural Center has been a central site for Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities of the Bay Area to preserve and celebrate cultural traditions, present new interdisciplinary creative works, and to nurture grassroots social justice movements with artists, activists, and allies.

Its founding as a “peña”—or place offering music, food, and political support to cultures of resistance in South America in the 1960s-70s—has guided their calling of challenging dominant narratives and centering marginalized positions for nearly fifty years, and they proudly stand as the last such “peña” still in existence today.