How the Restaurant Workers' Community Foundation Put Equity First to Decolonize Philanthropy

Kiki Louya, executive director of the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. Photo by Nick Hagen.

Starting out with no money can actually be a big advantage. At least it was for the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. We had no mandate to preserve extracted wealth and no family members clamoring for influence over grant distributions. But we were endowed with a core belief in equity and a deep commitment to learning from the community organizers and thinkers who came before us. Now that we’re moving millions of dollars, it is restaurant workers who are deciding our priorities. 

In 2016, when our founders John deBary and Alex Pemoulie set upon the idea of creating a public charity, they were restaurant workers themselves. Their idea: Use the community foundation model to raise and distribute funds to a network of progressive organizations focused on meeting the needs of restaurant workers nationwide.

They also recognized that decades of systemic inequity could not be undone overnight, and spent nearly two years speaking with movement leaders like One Fair Wage’s Saru Jayaraman (previously of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United) to assess how they might support systems change work nationwide. They recruited a board of restaurant workers who were active in social change, and they worked closely with Lawyers Alliance of New York City to structure equity into the organization’s founding documents and bylaws with a focus on long-term systems change using a mix of grantmaking, community-building and impact investing.

At the time RWCF was taking shape, deBary’s husband Michael Hamill Remaley had the good fortune to be a colleague of Edgar Villanueva, progressive philanthropic strategist and noted author. In his book “Decolonizing Wealth,” Villanueva wondered whether traditional funding mechanisms could be replaced by a living resource system approach.

In such a system, as the folks at Movement Net Lab put it, “Resources are identified, linked, moved, supported and restructured by everyone in the network so that they fit the dynamic nature of networked movements. Resources need to be placed in funding pools where activists can be central to the decision-making process, and funds need to be structured so they can flow to the emerging landscape of self-organized actions rather than just through formal, pre-existing organizations.” 

Remaley was intrigued, and from day one, RWCF has aimed to be not just a grantmaker, but an advocacy and action nonprofit created by and for restaurant workers. But the restaurant workers who started the foundation also recognized that they had a lot to learn about how to establish and grow a community foundation. So they aimed to increase the board of directors to 20 members, composed of equal parts restaurant workers and people with nonprofit/foundation expertise.   

When RWCF got its 501(c)(3) designation in September 2018, it began to test its ideas and see if donors would be attracted to its operating model. In a few short months, RWCF raised $11,500 and made small grants to three organizations: Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Brandworkers and OutSmartNYC. 

For 2019, its first full fiscal year, RWCF’s board set a modest goal of raising $30,000, and were thrilled that they surpassed that fundraising goal by 30%, with a healthy mix of corporate and individual donations and event revenue. RWCF also expanded the number of grantees in its network to 11 organizations, chosen by a volunteer Grantmaking and Nonprofit Partnerships Committee, and co-chaired by one nonprofit leader and one restaurant worker.  

RWCF went into 2020 still an all-volunteer organization, with a conservative goal of raising $100,000. It also aimed to empower its leaders to move the work forward with the help of active volunteers. It helped that RWCF’s board was already diverse in terms of race, immigrant status, gender identity, sexual orientation, educational credentialing, front/back-of-house, etc. But actively inviting additional volunteer leadership allowed us to get even more perspectives and essential help doing all aspects of the work.  

In early March 2020, with shutdowns looming for restaurants across the nation, RWCF’s board met in an emergency session via Zoom. The board’s first priority was to create an information and resources page on our website for workers and restaurant owners, which ended up getting about 20,000 hits a day in the first two months of the crisis. The board also set up the Restaurant Workers COVID-19 Crisis Relief Fund, which provided direct financial assistance for workers (50%); grants to nonprofits providing crisis services like food assistance, pro bono legal assistance, mental healthcare and immigrant-specific help to restaurant workers (25%); and zero-interest loans to small restaurant businesses (25%). 

We thought that maybe if we worked really hard to get the word out, we could raise a few hundred thousand dollars and be helpful to a tiny portion of the 15 million people in the U.S. who work in the hospitality industry. But by the end of 2020, our fundraising efforts succeeded far beyond those initial hopes. By the end of 2020, RWCF had raised nearly $7 million for the crisis fund and another $1 million for RWCF’s core systems change work, all from a wonderfully diverse set of individual donors, corporate givers, donor-advised funds, family foundations and a small number of private foundations.   

Looking back on the restaurant crisis, one silver lining was that, in the early months, we had a large number of volunteers—out-of-work folk from all across the country who wanted to help. With our fast-growing social media following, we also put out calls on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for more volunteers and acquired a few new leaders in the process.

Despite the influx of volunteer support from within the restaurant worker community, the board knew that RWCF needed to put some of its newfound resources into institutionalizing and formalizing its commitments to equity in every aspect of its work. In June 2020, even as many board members were working 80-hour weeks to raise and distribute millions to nonprofits serving restaurant workers across the country, we conducted an assessment of our operations. Findings were generally positive, especially regarding our commitment to equity, but the report also identified a host of necessary improvements to RWCF’s procedures and long-term planning. 

With a grant from United Philanthropy Forum’s Momentum Fund, RWCF then developed a contract with BUAG to work on strengthening its governance procedures. BUAG was also contracted to lead a nationwide search to identify RWCF’s first executive director, and after five months, I was chosen to lead the organization into the future. 

I started working in restaurants in high school and have toggled back and forth between nonprofits and restaurants for the past two decades. I have also worked in philanthropy for long enough to understand that the field’s existence is dependent on the perpetuation of the very problems we aim to solve. By contrast, RWCF has developed an inclusive leadership structure that offers restaurant workers a seat at the table, whereby my own lived experience in the industry matters and adds value to our understanding of the problems our organization was founded to address.

In his book “Winners Take All,” Anand Giridharadas accurately diagnoses the condition of much of philanthropy in the United States. “When elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is—above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners,” Giridharadas wrote. “In an age defined by the chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations.”  

As a former restaurant worker myself, I had often felt scared and helpless in the face of discrimination, harassment and unfair treatment in the industry. It is the same feeling people in the most vulnerable positions in our society experience every single day. But RWCF has found that it’s not enough to give them a voice. We need to invite them to the table, which is why we are operationalizing worker power to change the entire industry. 

By decolonizing philanthropy and putting the decision-making back in the hands of the very individuals we aim to support, our approach shifts from transactional to equitable. It moves from private to public. It moves from perceived change to real change. It brings us back to the heart of philanthropy and reminds us why it all matters in the first place.

Kiki Louya is the executive director of the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation.

Editor’s Note: Michael Hamill Remaley is a contributing editor for Inside Philanthropy.