Spotlight on East Oakland Dreamers: Planting seeds, pouring back
At Oakland Bloom, we believe that food is political expression and healing. Food is culture, and it’s community.
Our community hub in Oakland Chinatown, called Open Test Kitchen, is a place for neighbors to gather and be themselves. If you are anything like us, whenever we invite people over, we all end up crowded and laughing in the kitchen. Over the next few months, we want to introduce you to the partners and collaborators who have brought more people to our kitchen and made it their own.
Claudia Luz Suarez is a Salvadoran filmmaker, organizer in East Oakland and one of the co-founders of East Oakland Dreamers. We talked about the Youth Kitchen Lab, a new project by East Oakland Dreamers and Oakland Bloom, and how their work has changed in the past 15 years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Oakland Bloom: To get things going, can you talk about East Oakland Dreamers? How did that start? Why?
Claudia Luz Suarez: East Oakland Dreamers was founded in 2009 by a group of high school students at Castlemont High School. We were transitioning from high school to post secondary and facing a lot of uncertainty as undocumented youth. How were we going to survive and pay for tuition? Once we were all in school and in college, it became bigger.
We have a mentorship program with Oakland high schools, mutual aid, and fundraising support. We focus on political education, especially on migration. During COVID, a lot of mutual aid and dispersing funds, and disseminating information. Recently, we’ve shifted some of our mission to support low-income and migrant communities and to build and redefine generational wealth. We’re helping young people not be boxed into one career path, and explore different pathways.
OB: Where does the Youth Kitchen Lab fit in? What should people know about it?
CLS: Oakland Bloom is doing the food industry in a different way. We want people in our communities to build careers that pour back into our communities and strengthen our neighborhoods. East Oakland Dreamers used to exist for us, but now, how do we go beyond that?
A lot of us are in education, so we tap into all the schools in Oakland Unified. Our project lead, Avé-Ameenah Long, recruited participants through the libraries. She had a local approach, flyering in local areas that are touch points for young people.
The Youth Kitchen Lab is a day-long workshop where young people learn about the food industry, restaurant industry, owning a business, food justice and sovereignty. They learn the whole path, from harvesting to reaching consumers. There’s storytelling around the ingredients, and they learn food safety and cleaning standards. They learn how a kitchen works, expo, prep, sous chef. The group cooks together and then has a family-style dinner together.
OB: It’s a new project, but it sounds like these first workshops were successful. Where do you see this going?
CLS: Our goal was to provide hands-on culinary training and an introduction to food justice, food systems and business ownerships. Planting seeds. Is this something [the participants] would consider in the future?
We’re an organization of volunteers. Our goal is to have the Youth Kitchen Lab be a yearly project that we’re building out and evolving and growing. We were just funded for four workshops. Getting stable and consistent funding is a challenge.
They went well. It was so beautiful. In addition to the lead chef, we had two young chefs help teach, so they also got their own learning experiences with teaching. We want to keep doing it.