Paty Funegra of La Cocina VA has raised $2 million to turn her community kitchen into an incubator, a caf茅 and a place of hope for struggling immigrants.
By Collen DeBiase – The Story Exchange
It鈥檚 a big moment: Paty Funegra is getting ready to聽聽her kitchen out of the basement.
Funegra is the founder of聽, a聽聽that helps unemployed Latino immigrants find jobs in the food industry by teaching them聽聽and language skills. For the past five years, she has run the culinary-training organization from the lower floor of Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington, Virgina. But now, she鈥檚 ready to scale 鈥 and recently raised $2 million to open the Zero Barriers Training & Entrepreneurship Center, which will include a state-of-the-art kitchen incubator, a community cafe, and, she hopes, the promise of a successful future for newly arrived immigrants.
An immigrant herself, the Peruvian-born Funegra says she feels it鈥檚 her responsibility to help the vulnerable 鈥 especially now. In the wake of the El Paso shootings, and amid anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, 鈥渨e see a lot of fear in our communities,鈥 she says.
鈥淢y position is to hands-on jump in and do something about it. Don鈥檛 fight back that rhetoric with words but with actions.鈥
Learning the Best Approach
It took Funegra a while to figure out how to best help immigrants.
She grew up in Lima during a turbulent time of violence, poverty and narcotics trafficking. In 2007, she moved to the U.S. after falling in love with an American (the relationship didn鈥檛 work out) and eventually took a job with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. While the bank finances economic development projects in Latin America, Funegra felt disconnected, being so far away. 鈥淚 was never able to experience how families in Nicaragua, or in Brazil, or back in Peru, were being the beneficiaries of these investments,鈥 she says. 鈥淪o I started looking around, here in the D.C. region, for opportunities to get involved with my Latino community.鈥
Funegra became a volunteer at DC Central Kitchen, a 30-year-old community kitchen that helps unemployed adults learn restaurant-industry skills while also donating the meals that they cook to the homeless or hungry. 鈥淪o I went there to chop carrots and onions,鈥 she recalls, noticing that the kitchen mostly served the African-American community. That was her 鈥渁-ha鈥 moment. She asked Executive Director Michael Curtin if she could replicate the community kitchen idea, but this time serving Latinos. 鈥淢ike was very generous, accepting right away,鈥 she says with a laugh, but 鈥渉e didn鈥檛 realize that I was serious about it.鈥
Not only was she serious, Funegra launched La Cocina VA a short six months later, while still working full-time. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 have $5,000 back then鈥 to hire a lawyer, she says, so she took online courses on聽. Then she needed to raise more money and find partners. 鈥淚 remember I was skipping lunches and breakfast at work, just to go and knock on different doors.鈥
The missing piece 鈥 and it was a big one 鈥 was an inexpensive kitchen for hands-on preparation, plus classrooms for English classes. Fortunately, Funegra knocked on the door of Mount Olivet, which took an interest in her idea and donated the use of its basement. 鈥淭his has been an amazing partner,鈥 Funegra says. She quit her day job, drained her savings to print her first promotional materials, and began her new career.
Changing Lives Through Food
Since 2014, over 120 students have taken part in the fully-funded 16-week bilingual training program, in which they take classes on food prep, nutrition, sanitation and kitchen vocabulary. Graduates receive certification through Northern Virginia Community College. Some 85% have found jobs in the industry, and graduates鈥 average hourly wage is $14 per hour, nearly double the state鈥檚 minimum wage of $7.25, according to La Cocina鈥檚 2018 annual report.
Funegra has signed up a number of corporate partners, including food giant Nestl茅. 鈥淟a Cocina VA is providing students the skills they need to succeed in a huge and important sector of the economy: food,鈥 the company said聽. With some 1.46 million people in the U.S.聽聽in the food and beverage industry, Nestle added that it鈥檚 鈥渢hrilled to connect with trained talent.鈥 Other partners include Hilton and Whole Foods.
Funegra says the majority of students are women immigrants from Central and South America, and many have been victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking. With La Cocina VA graduates now holding down jobs and making a collective $2.6 million in salaries, she hopes their success inspires other immigrants 鈥渢o look at the future with hope and with light.鈥
The new center, which is scheduled to open this coming March, would triple the program鈥檚 current capacity, allowing 120 trainees to graduate each year. It will be located on the first floor of an affordable housing complex. The cafe is expected to generate revenue for La Cocina VA, while the incubator would help aspiring food entrepreneurs test out ideas. 鈥淲e have dreamers that are dreaming about starting businesses, especially women from the Latino community,鈥 Funegra says. 鈥淚 am immensely proud that now, in the very near future, we will be able to support them to 鈥 create jobs and to contribute to the economy.鈥
Funegra believes her own experience as an immigrant has fueled La Cocina VA鈥檚 growth.聽 鈥淎ll those moments of challenges and obstacles, and barriers, and lack of clarity of the future, built the skills that I have now,鈥 she says.