What's at stake?
Fresno nonprofit Cultiva La Salud has secured a space for a new community kitchen to serve the city’s mobile food vendors. It’s soon to be one of multiple operating in the Fresno area – although without any funding support from the city that officials pledged after a street vendor was killed in 2021.
Calling it a “huge step forward,” local nonprofit Cultiva La Salud plans to open a new community kitchen near downtown, a move they hope sets the table for more mobile food vendors.
The property, which originally served as a laundromat, is located on Fresno Street, just south of Highway 180. It could be over a year before the building turns into a functional kitchen for the city’s mobile vendors to prepare food, said Cultiva executive director (and Fresno Unified trustee) Veva Islas.
But Cultiva is eager to follow through on the promises made to Fresno’s large – and growing – mobile food vendor community after street vendor Lorenzo Perez was gunned down on the job in 2021.
“We hope that this building will be transformative,” Islas said, “not just for the mobile food vending community who will have a place to operate but also for the neighborhood.”
After Perez’s murder over three years ago, city leaders vowed to do more to support vendors. That included creating a Food Vendor Association to improve communication with the city, investments in vendors’ safety, and a formalized permitting process.
Councilmembers Miguel Arias and Luis Chavez also pledged $5 million to help build a downtown commercial kitchen where vendors could prepare their food and ensure their compliance with food safety regulations.
But the promise to help fund a community kitchen has yet to be fulfilled – though folks like Islas and others have managed to open a handful of them across the city in recent years anyway.
“At this point, we haven’t been helped by the city at all,” Islas said.
“I’m hopeful that something will materialize,” she added, “but I’m just not counting on anything quite yet.”
Arias and Chavez said part of what’s caused the delay is that some of the potential buildings they had their sights set on for the kitchen fell through – including an old, city-owned warehouse across from Chukchansi Park that would have cost more than $5 million to renovate.
That property, which has since been demolished, has instead since been designated for high-density housing as Mayor Jerry Dyer’s administration looks to revitalize downtown with (pending) help from the state.
“We’ve had a couple of false starts with securing the right location,” Arias said. “I’m hopeful that once – whether it’s Cultiva or anyone else – can secure a location … then the city is going to be prepared to support the project.”
He and Chavez both said they’re going to push for funding in the next round of budget meetings. These meetings won’t be open to the public, however, while a lawsuit resulting from a Fresnoland investigation determines whether that budget process violates state law.
“A lot of us have been doing some legwork on what projects and priorities we’re going to be presenting,” Chavez said “This will be one of my priorities for the budget that we’re going to finalize in June.”
Fresno vendors themselves say Cultiva’s kitchen is a long time coming, even though the timeline for renovations could take another year.
“We’ve been here a long time, fighting for a kitchen for ourselves,” said Food Vendor Association vice president Miguel Ruiz in an interview in Spanish, “and a year – well, I think that a year will go by quickly.”
The additional kitchen will benefit “hundreds and hundreds” of mobile food vendors that the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation assists with licensing and permitting, said the foundation’s president Dora Westerlund.
“It’s necessary and much needed,” she said. “For mobile food vendors to be fully equipped and fully functioning, they need to have a space where they’re able to prepare their food.”
Cultiva La Salud’s kitchen vision
The “primary function” of the kitchen, Islas said, will be to offer mobile food vendors and small business caterers to prepare food in larger volumes than they would in a home kitchen.
But she’s also envisioning it as an “educational facility.”
Cultiva staff will assist the vendors with city licensing, permitting, and compliance with health regulations.
“There is a lot of detail that is just not common knowledge,” Islas said, “and they end up getting cited and criminalized just for trying to create a living.”
She hopes Cultiva can assist the vendors that use the kitchen with menu-planning, too, to marry Cultiva’s public health advocacy goals to their work supporting mobile food vendors.
That ties into Cultiva La Salud’s role in the Fresno-Merced Future of Food or F3 coalition, a four-year project to bolster and modernize the Fresno area’s agricultural economy with $65 million in funding from the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge.
Cultiva is spearheading efforts to engage with mobile food vendors and deliver fresh produce to food-insecure communities as part of F3’s goal to create a more equitable food system.
“The reality is that a lot of the mobile vendors (and) peddlers are not necessarily selling the healthiest things that we want our community to have more access to,” Islas said, including fresh fruits and vegetables.
But “the beauty of them being mobile,” she added, is that they can deliver food to places where folks already live or gather – like following a church service or after school.
At the community kitchen, Islas hopes her staff can consult with vendors on their recipes and connect them with local farmers to ensure they’re leveraging that mobility to bring healthy foods into disadvantaged communities.
More funding hurdles lie ahead for Cultiva’s community kitchen
But realizing Cultiva’s vision for the community kitchen is going to take more funding. Islas expects the project is “easily going to be over $1 million” to complete.
So far, Cultiva paid $50,000 the down payment for the space on Belmont and First and took out a loan on the building.
Cultiva’s roughly $2 million contract with F3 does set aside funding for a manager and equipment for the community kitchen, Islas added.
“It’s (a) good resource that we’re going to be able to count on to help,” she said, “but it’s not available for the purchase or any improvements that need to be made” to the building.
They’re planning to turn to philanthropy as well as potential fundraising with the public to help fill in the gaps, Islas said.
City funding for kitchen uncertain
Chavez said the city followed through on “three out of the four big asks” from the food vendor community, with the exception of the community kitchen, so far.
In addition to creating the Food Vendor Association, the city allocated $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding for the installation of security cameras on mobile food vendors’ carts.
Ruiz, the association’s vice president, said vendors are grateful for these small investments from the city so far.
“Because of them we have the cameras we have to help us stay safe,” he said. “So they did support us a little bit, and we’re going to be fighting so they can keep supporting us.”
Chavez added that he knows how important the fourth “ask” – the community kitchen – remains, however, and that there’s more work to do this next budget cycle.
But it’s unclear how much money, if any, the city may set aside for the kitchen this time around, or where the funding will come from.
That was another issue the city ran into in previous years, Arias said.
The $5 million Chavez and Arias originally hoped to put toward renovating the warehouse across from Chukchansi Park got cut in half to $2.5 million in ARPA funding in the fiscal year 2024 budget.
Arias worries ARPA grants may no longer be a viable funding stream for the kitchen, however, given the end-of-year deadline to allocate grants from the federal program.
“In our defense, the city set aside federal funds that were immediately available, but with significant strings (attached) that they must be spent by a certain date,” he said. “We weren’t able to secure a project for construction within that timeframe.”
Those ARPA funds were reallocated toward infrastructure investments, Arias said.
“So we now have to shift to finding an alternative funding source” for the kitchen, he added, “which happens quite often in the city.”
Other community kitchens cropping up
Cultiva La Salud’s proposed community kitchen won’t be the only one in the city of Fresno.
One of the most recent to open includes AJ’s Commissary Kitchen in Chinatown, which didn’t receive funding from the city beyond support with permitting, Arias said.
Others include Hot Spot Kitchen on Belmont Avenue in the South Tower neighborhood and the Clovis Culinary Center further east off of Willow and Ashlan.
Westerlund of the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation said she’s glad to see the “ecosystem” of support for mobile food vendors becoming more robust.
“That is an advantage that they have,” she said, “when we have more options and opportunities for them.”
Islas said she’s wishing success to the growing “constellation” of community kitchens across the Fresno area and doesn’t think of them as competition.
“Doing the work of a community kitchen is not easy work,” she said. “We need much more resources to support small food businesses.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the location of the planned commercial kitchen. It is located on Fresno Street, just south of Highway 180.
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