Food sharing as an opportunity to create jobs for refugees

Food sharing as an opportunity to create jobs for refugees ! We would like to share a tasty and warm article by Mat Petronzio, 'This restaurant is run only by migrants and refugee women'. This initiative supports refugees' employment opportunities in a concrete and inventive manner, adaptable in other parts of the world. 

Mazí Mas is a London-based pop-up restaurant collectively run by women from migrant and refugee communities. These women, all mothers, have had difficulty finding work in the UK due to what some deem a lack of qualifications; nonetheless, they've developed extraordinary culinary skills from years of caring for their families. Kopcke wants to help bridge that gap.

"The idea is to bring to the public something I feel we don't get enough of, which is this amazing cooking you get in homes, but don't usually get a chance to try unless you're invited to someone's home for dinner," Kopcke, who acts as Mazí Mas' CEO, tells Mashable. "And at the same time, it's to create much-needed jobs for women who have no opportunities whatsoever."

The company connects with these women through partnering with several grassroots organizations in London. The current chefs of Mazí Mas come from all over the world, including Brazil, Iran, Ethiopia, Turkey, Senegal and Peru. Those who eat at the restaurant are able to taste authentic international cuisines, while benefitting the women behind them.

The chefs at Mazí Mas have all attended universities and had jobs in their home countries. But moving to the UK under difficult circumstances, often as refugees, has presented them as unqualified for the workforce.

Originally, Mazí Mas was purely a pop-up model, setting up in places only for one to three days at a time. As you could imagine, it got chaotic, and it was tough to market an ever-moving restaurant to patrons. But now the team works mostly with arts organizations — in theaters, specifically, which often have dormant or underutilized kitchen facilities.

After a recently successful crowdfunding campaign, the next step is to secure a permanent restaurant, hopefully within the next two years. In the more distant future, Kopcke hopes the model will be locally adaptable in other areas of the world, and locally responsive to the varying needs of those areas. In fact, there's already a smaller sister organization, Mazí Mas Sydney, working exclusively with asylum seekers in Australia.

"Food is very powerful in terms of social change, because it has that ability to bring people together," Kopcke says. "It's something that transcends all barriers — the universal language."

Read the full article.