January 4

Help keep San Diego’s watersheds clean with I Love A Clean San Diego and the County of San Diego. This litter cleanup runs from 9:00 am to 11:00 am and helps prevent pollution from reaching the Pacific Ocean.

Watershed Warriors: Fallbrook Library Cleanup

January 11

Same mission, different location. Join the litter cleanup in Fallbrook from 9:00 am to 11:00 am to protect local ecosystems.

November 12, 2024

40 San Diego Charities & Nonprofits to Donate to on Giving TuesdayRELATED ARTICLE

San Diego Resolution Run 5K, 10K, Half Marathon

January 11

Volunteer at Tecolote Shores in Mission Bay Park to support runners and event logistics during this annual fitness tradition.

Carlsbad Marathon, Half Marathon & 5K

January 19

Celebrate the San Diego Foundation’s 50th anniversary—which SDF will be celebrating with different events throughout 2025—by volunteering at this iconic event in Carlsbad.

37th Annual All Peoples Celebration

January 20

Hosted by Alliance San Diego, this inspiring event honors community diversity and social justice with opportunities to get involved.

Rain Barrel Workshop and Distribution

January 25

Learn about water harvesting with the Solana Center at the North Clairemont Recreation Center and take home a rain barrel for sustainable water use.

WeAllCount Point-in-Time Homeless Census

January 30

Volunteer to collect vital data on homelessness across San Diego County, supporting the County’s resource allocation and services.

The Next 45: Building a Sustainable Legacy

January 30

Celebrate 45 years of the San Diego Diplomacy Council with an evening focused on global connection and peacebuilding, featuring young leaders from Kiribati.

The post 8 San Diego Nonprofit Events to Attend This January appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“I founded One Love Movement upon realizing my purpose in life: to make change for people who don’t have a voice,” Bauman says. Her mission is deeply personal, rooted in her experience as a Korean orphan adopted by an American family and inspired by a volunteer trip she took to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

 “I was struggling with the heartbreak of being no different than all of the orphans I had met, yet, somehow, I was picked for a better life,” Bauman recalls. She felt inspired to create a nonprofit.

Today, One Love Movement brings people together through yoga, sound baths, and other events and retreats to support causes that promote social justice. It’s especially committed to advocacy, youth welfare, dignity, and wellness. For Bauman, the work is about helping others realize their strength and compassion to create positive change.

A standout moment for Bauman was meeting Michelle Obama via Zoom. “I freaked out,” she laughs, recalling her disbelief when she got the call. “I kept asking the guy if this was a scam!” When she finally logged onto the Zoom call and saw the former First Lady, it was a full-circle moment that reinforced her belief that anything is possible. “I knew that I didn’t have to know how I would get there, I just had to know that I would,” she says.

But Bauman’s journey building One Love Movement hasn’t always been smooth. For nine years, Bauman organized the largest charity yoga event in the country, a fundraiser that drew thousands. While the event was successful, it left her emotionally drained, with a yearly cycle of anxiety and depression that culminated after each event. 

“I kept thinking this great, big event was the answer!” Bauman says, realizing she had tied her self-worth to the event’s success. The pandemic in 2020 forced her to pause, and that’s when she had a breakthrough. “I realized that I was looking outside of myself for all of the answers,” she adds. It was a pivotal moment that led her to focus on internal fulfillment rather than external validation.

Bauman continues to build the One Love Movement, offering donation-based yoga classes and sound bath meditation and organizing volunteer retreats to Peru and Kenya. “The best way to support our work is through donations; coming to our yoga classes, retreats, and events; or sharing our work with your friends and family,” she says. 

As One Love Movement evolves, Bauman’s mission remains clear: to create spaces where compassion leads to action, making the world a better place for all.

The post One Love Movement Empowers Change Through Compassion & Community appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

The iconic theater also recently announced its 2025 season, which includes world premiere musicals, West Coast and San Diego premieres, and two of Shakespeare’s popular comedies. Highlights include the musical comedy Regency Girls; Huzzah!, a musical from the creators of Legally Blonde and Mean Girls, Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe; Empty Ride by Keiko Green; House of India by Deepak Kumar; and The Janeiad by Anna Ziegler.

Two West Coast premieres, Deceived by Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson and Small by Robert Montano, will run alongside San Diego premieres of Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and One of the Good Ones by Gloria Calderón Kellett. The annual Shakespeare Festival will feature All’s Well That Ends Well and The Comedy of Errors.

Photos courtesy of The Old Globe

The post Photos: The 2024 Old Globe Gala Black & White Masquerade appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

From her work advocating for equitable education in underserved communities to her involvement in grassroots activism for LGBTQ+ rights, Hussain’s story is one of resilience, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to making a difference.

Hussain was born and raised in Qatar, a country she describes as having “vast economic divides between the wealthy locals and the many migrant workers who support the booming economy.”

“I grew up in the Middle East in a largely Indian private school,” she says, explaining that most private schools were typically Arab and wealthy. Her school, with over 10,000 students, was a great equalizer—a place where all wore uniforms, hiding any wealth or relative lack thereof, and focused on education regardless of their backgrounds. For Hussain, school represented stability and opportunity, two things not easily afforded to many in the migrant communities around her. 

“All I wanted to do was go to school,” she recalls, emphasizing how education was a cherished privilege in her family. Though they struggled financially, with her family relying on aid to send all five children to the same school, Hussain’s experience instilled in her a belief in the transformative power of education and the fundamental right to receive a good one.

Hussain explains that her family experience, one of hardship and resilience, undergirds her volunteer lifestyle. She says that as immigrants in a country where visas are controlled by work permits, they navigated life with the constant fear of deportation, as her father’s jobs in the military ebbed and flowed, and he was frequently unemployed. She adds that it was a “huge opportunity” for her father to have immigrated to Qatar, and that it changed her life, regardless of the difficulties her family faced once there

“We never threw away boxes,” Hussain remembers, explaining how her family always had to be ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. Growing up in an environment with a fundamental lack of security stuck with her. She’s impassioned to fight for others to have access to the opportunities she had to fight so hard to secure. Education was the core of that vision, and it became a mission in her budding career.

As she left school, Hussain started working for global nonprofits focused on education and humanitarian aid in South Asia and the Middle East. She built schools and implemented community programs in countries like Indonesia and Cambodia and says the work was deeply personal. “For me, it just felt like this is what I needed when I was a kid,” she says. The faces she saw were familiar—children wearing the same school uniforms she once wore and living in conditions that mirrored her experiences. It wasn’t just work for her; it became her mission.

But as Hussain’s professional work took her around the world, her heart stayed close to the migrant worker communities in Qatar, where she grew up. Seeing firsthand the inequities faced by these communities—who lived in labor camps and were often stripped of their fundamental human rights—she got into underground activism, volunteering indirectly for Amnesty International and focusing on supporting migrant workers. “I saw myself as part of those people in those camps, and that’s why I felt this urge that something had to be done,” she says. Her efforts included organizing food drives and finding ways to offer support, even when it meant operating in the shadows due to the sensitive political climate in Qatar.

This advocacy work came with risks. Whistleblowers within Hussain’s network started losing their work permits and faced legal repercussions for speaking out. Eventually, she felt she had to stop working underground and moved to San Diego in 2016 through a work transfer at a biotech marketing company.

She describes the culture shock of moving from what she describes as family—and community-oriented Middle Eastern cultures to fast-paced Southern California, remembering a sense that though people were friendly and well-meaning, people in the United States can be much more individualistic. She wasn’t catching the vibrant discussions about social issues and the sense of collective responsibility she had been used to in her communities back in Qatar.

To add to the disillusionment, her work visa was rejected during a renewal process in 2018, which she notes happened during a particularly contentious time in immigration history during President Trump’s administration, a climate that persists today. Hussain was facing deportation—a situation she describes as familiar from childhood, so she knew what to do. However, she felt her life was unraveling while her work status was on hold and her future uncertain.

Hussain says that, during that time, a friend from the LGBTQ+ community encouraged her to volunteer for the Human Rights Campaign’s annual gala in San Diego. “All I wanted to do was just feel like I was doing something,” she says, recalling how volunteering became a lifeline. What started as one night of pro bono event crewing quickly evolved into a deeper involvement.

“I got in immediately,” she says, taking on responsibilities within HRC’s steering committee and eventually becoming a digital communications leader. She says the work gave her a renewed sense of purpose and reconnected her to her activist and volunteer roots.

Hussain’s roles at HRC are multifaceted. She leads digital communications for the San Diego chapter, serves on the National Board of Governors, and is a leader within the organization’s Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) affinity group. 

Her work involves everything from year-round organizing for volunteers and membership outreach to supporting grassroots LGBTQ+ organizations with funding and visibility. For Hussain, it’s about creating a more inclusive movement that centers the voices of those traditionally marginalized—especially within the LGBTQ+ advocacy space itself, which she contends can often be “very white spaces.” 

“It takes one to know one,” she emphasizes, underscoring the importance of having diverse leaders who understand the nuances of intersectional identities.

Navigating the complexities of being a queer, South Asian, Muslim immigrant has given Hussain a unique perspective on advocacy, she thinks. She recognizes the challenges faced by those who straddle multiple marginalized identities, particularly in cultures where being queer is not widely accepted or even safe.

For Hussain, San Diego’s diversity—often hidden by geographic and social divides—offers challenges and opportunities for activism and impact. She dedicates herself to bridging these divides by elevating underrepresented voices and driving change at the local level through organizing campaigns for unhoused LGBTQ+ youth or supporting pro-equality candidates in political office. “Advocacy is more than just speaking up—it’s about systemic change and building communities that uplift one another,” she says.

Hussain’s humanist spirit has taken her from underground activism in Qatar to her leadership role at HRC San Diego, a journey that taught her the reality of intersectionality, the necessity of community support, and the enduring belief that change is possible even in the most materially and politically tense conditions. For now, San Diego has become where she continues to fight for that change, helping to bring the voices of all marginalized people out from the shadows.

The post Hooriya Hussain’s Global Path to Advocacy with Human Rights Campaign appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Since January, members of Pillars of the Community (Pillars), a grassroots nonprofit based in Encanto, have mobilized, offering critical aid where government assistance has been either slow or absent. In the early days after the storm, volunteer Ricky Weaver says that groups like theirs were the only ones with help available.

“When no one was there to help people process their traumatic experience, Pillars allowed us to go in and do the work,” Weaver says.

“Many families in Southeast San Diego struggled to cope with the aftermath. We provided emotional help and physical manpower, and whatever we had going on at the headquarters ceased. We focused on helping the people even when their city failed them in a time of need,” Weaver adds. He thinks their efforts in helping to clear flooded properties, rescue people, distribute food and other aid, and act as government and agency liaisons were crucial in those vulnerable moments right after the flood.

This ad hoc but effective strategy underscores Pillars of the Community’s unique role in Southeast. The organization is not just about advocacy; it acts as an independent community agency supporting people in times of crisis and with day-to-day needs, providing resources lacking from other institutions, including governments.

Pillars of the Community was founded in 2010 by local community leaders and activists as an advocacy response to systemic injustices that disproportionately affect Southeast residents, particularly concerning criminal justice. Since then, it has become a dynamic community hub providing court support, legal help, community organizing, and political education, empowering people to take on the legal system directly or make changes through civic engagement and policy changes. 

A core Pillars belief is in the power of communities to heal themselves and take back control through community organizing and collective action, especially in areas like Southeast, which have been historically subject to over-policing and a lack of infrastructural, economic, and social resources.

Weaver has lived this himself. Since returning from prison a few years ago, he started working with Pillars, becoming a prominent community figure and advocate for youth impacted by the justice system. He feels “deeply personally” connected to Pillars’ mission, offering his journey from joining a gang at ten to where he is now as a testament to the transformative power of grassroots activism. He also credits his childhood involvement in after-school programs that taught the philosophies of the Black Panther Party and the US Organization, which he says laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to social justice and “carried” him through his eventual prison sentence. He adds these experiences gave him “a deep understanding of the importance of organizing community members to build collective power.”

These deep beliefs led Weaver to activism. After prison, he returned to Southeast with a renewed sense of purpose. He joined with Pillars to provide support, however needed: youth coaching, probation support, court system support (including court watching), and work in policy change. He has also recently founded Grind2Gether, a new youth football nonprofit, with Wally Henry, a Lincoln High alum and former NFL player. The football camp accompanies mentoring talks with Weaver and his friends.

Weaver says he joined Pillars because he believes it genuinely provides needed help for Southeast residents and isn’t just lip service. “Pillars showed me the needs and inequities that exist in my community of Southeast San Diego, and they wanted to apply my lived experience to that need,” he says. “They are real people that pursue excellence in all they do, which is powerful to me.”

It’s not all smooth sailing, especially when facing decades of systemic inequity. According to Weaver, one of the biggest obstacles to working in community activism is navigating the bureaucratic red tape that often hinders the timely delivery of resources to those in need. “Knowing that resources are out there for people to fall back on, yet the red tape system is in place that holds the people back… It’s frustrating,” Weaver admits. Since Pillars relies primarily on funding grants and donations from the public, it’s limited in what it can provide. So, it pairs tangible support with education and mobilization, providing a pathway for the momentum to continue.

Today, Pillars continues to work to get flood-affected Southeast San Diegans back on their feet while consistently hosting events, including workshops on legal rights, community health fairs, and town hall meetings focused on housing justice. In July, it sponsored a talk by activist and scholar Angela Davis at San Diego City College, discussing racial justice, mass incarceration, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Pillars also recently launched a donation-based community newspaper, All Rise, in collaboration with PANA and the Asian Solidarity Collective.

Weaver encourages those who want to work more closely with their community to look within: “Be willing to provide a service that you would want if you were in that situation. It’s your community. Be part of it if you live and exist in that village. Help others help themselves.” He and the other volunteers at Pillars of the Community strive to do just that in Southeast–its work is a testament to the power of community action.

The post Pillars of the Community’s Fight for Southeast San Diego appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Guests sipped on Moroccan-inspired cocktails while strolling through a traditional Riad garden with florals and twinkling lanterns. The sound of traditional drums drew guests to a poolside oasis offering mouthwatering appetizers and small bites before being called to dinner in the ballroom for an enchanted evening under a canopy of stars, surrounded by Moroccan architecture-style archways and bougainvillea. 

Jewel Ball committee members adorned the ballroom with peacock-hued tablecloths, fuschia napkins and florals, gold-leaf vases, and lanterns. Wayne Foster Entertainment set the soundtrack, and Behind the Scenes Catering and Events provided a delectable dinner inspired by Morocco’s Mediterranean-style cuisine.  

Las Patronas announced that proceeds from the 78th Annual Jewel Ball will fund critically needed capital items for six nonprofit major beneficiaries, each receiving more than $40,000, and an estimated 45 to 50 additional minor beneficiaries, each receiving $20,000 or less. The major beneficiaries include Adapt Functional Movement Center, Center for Community Solutions, Guide Dogs of America, KPBS, Urban Street Angels Inc., and Zoological Society of San Diego.

“The generosity of our sponsors, donors, and vendors makes it possible for the members of Las Patronas to continue fulfilling our mission to support San Diego County nonprofit organizations,” said Las Patronas President Julie Garrie. “The Jewel Ball is a celebration of another successful year of fundraising.”Since its inception in 1946, Las Patronas has donated over $27 million to more than a thousand charitable institutions in San Diego. All funds raised by Las Patronas stay in San Diego County and are distributed to many small nonprofits and larger organizations.

The post Photos: Las Patronas 78th Annual Jewel Ball appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

September 7–8

Cardiff-by-the-Sea looks to Europe on September 7-8, 2024, with the Cardiff Greek Festival. This family-friendly event celebrates Greek culture through food, music, and dance, with proceeds supporting local Greek cultural organizations.

Promises2Kids Dream On Concert Gala

September 9

Presented by Kevin & Raegan Prior, philanthropist and Promises2Kids Board Member emeritus Joan Waitt will host the 2024 Promises2Kids Dream On Concert gala at her home in La Jolla. This star-studded event benefits foster children and features performances, gourmet dining, and live auctions. All proceeds support Promises2Kids programs.

FilmOut San Diego LGBT Film Festival

September 12–15

From September 12-15, 2024, multiple venues in San Diego will host the FilmOut San Diego LGBT Film Festival, one of Southern California’s longest-running LGBTQ film festivals. The event showcases films highlighting LGBTQ stories, with proceeds supporting local LGBTQ organizations.

Girl Scouts San Diego Urban Campout

September 13

The Girl Scouts San Diego Campus in Balboa Park will host the Urban Campout on September 13, 2024. This unique fundraising event features outdoor-themed activities, gourmet dining, and live entertainment. Proceeds support Girl Scouts San Diego’s programs that empower young girls through leadership and outdoor education.

Gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

September 14

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla will hold its annual gala on September 14, 2024. This vibrant evening features craft cocktails and a seaside dinner curated by renowned Chef Tim Kolanko, offering an unforgettable experience that supports the museum’s mission while enjoying stunning coastal views.

EcoLife Conservation Gala

September 14

On September 14, 2024, the LaFayette Hotel in San Diego will host the EcoLife Conservation Gala. This event supports EcoLife’s mission of environmental sustainability while also helping humanity through innovative cooking stoves and aquaponics. It features fine dining, live entertainment, and opportunities to contribute to initiatives that protect wildlife, natural resources, and vulnerable communities.

OMBAC Classic Longboard Surfing Contest

September 21

Pacific Beach will host the OMBAC Classic Longboard Surfing Contest at Crystal Pier on September 21, 2024. This nostalgic competition, featuring vintage surfboards, celebrates San Diego’s surfing culture and supports The Prevent Drowning Foundation of San Diego.

Pacific Islander Festival

September 21-22

On September 21-22, 2024, Ski Beach in Mission Bay will host the Pacific Islander Festival, celebrating the rich traditions and cultures of the Pacific Islands. The event features music, dance, and food, with proceeds supporting local Pacific Islander community programs.

Hope Lives Here Charity Golf Classic

September 26

On September 26, 2024, the Grand Golf Club in Del Mar will host the Hope Lives Here Charity Golf Classic. Organized by Father Joe’s Villages, this luxurious golf event supports veterans experiencing homelessness. The day includes tournament play, a gourmet lunch, and an awards reception, with all proceeds going towards critical services provided by Father Joe’s Villages.

La Jolla Concours d’Elegance

September 28–29

La Jolla Cove will set the stage for the La Jolla Concours d’Elegance on September 28-29, 2024. This event, featuring vintage cars and chic VIP receptions, showcases exquisite automotive design, and proceeds benefit local charities.

The post 10 San Diego Nonprofit Events to Attend This September appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“By the time I was 28, I was at the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous begging for mercy,” he says. “That’s when men came into my life that didn’t care about my backstory, didn’t care where I’d been or what I had done. They just wanted to know how I was going to clean up my mess and move my life forward.”

After rebuilding his life and marriage, Sigurdson wanted to give back. During his recovery, he began attending men’s retreats, at which participants were prompted to focus on accountability, acceptance, and doing what’s right. 

“It was a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “I could have used this at 14, not almost 40.”

Turns out he wasn’t the only one. Sigurdson; his father, Herb; and other retreat participants launched a mentoring program for boys, which evolved into the Boys to Men Mentoring Network.  

After joining up with Craig McClain, the father-son duo founded the program in La Mesa in 1996. Today, their trained mentors work to encourage and empower teenage boys, many of whom do not have a father in their lives—either physically or emotionally—and serve as positive male role models. 

“We’re not there to tell them what to do, just share with them what we’ve done. We’re sharing our experience, strength, and hope with the boys and modeling a healthy, authentic expression of truth and our own realities,” Sigurdson says. “The men create a safe place for the boys to open up, feel safe, and share their stories.”

In 2009, Boys to Men launched an in-school program for at-risk boys. The group mentoring model was a hit with students, parents, and staff and by 2019, had spread to 40 schools across nine school districts in San Diego County. Mentors meet with more than 1,000 boys each week and provide a judgement-free zone to explore their blocks, beliefs, issues, and traumas. The nonprofit also hosts other events, including adventure mountain weekends, on its 16-acre Boys to Men Ranch. 

Some of the boys go on to become mentors. Sigurdson recalls one of Boys to Men’s success stories, a third-generation gang member named Jose who had witnessed a drive-by shooting at only six-years-old.

Jose had been a good student and a high school football standout, but the pull of gang life was too strong, and he was kicked out of school for possessing weapons and drugs. He later enrolled in a continuation program and was introduced to Boys to Men. He was inspired to leave the gang and became a Boys to Men journeyman leader; Jose returned to the high school he was expelled from a few years later to mentor other troubled teens. 

“I’ve been totally blessed and privileged to be in this position where I get to have some kind of participation in somebody else’s success,” Sigurdson says. “That’s an amazing feeling.”

The post Paying it Forward With Boys to Men Mentoring Network appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

In the shared commercial kitchen beneath the church, women prep food, peeling the skin from roasted eggplants, sprinkling za’atar, and mixing their signature bizbaz sauce. Native languages that typically swish off the tongue—Arabic, Spanish, Somali, Burmese—are put aside in order to try on a new, often stilted, one: English. Some women wear hijabs or colorful headscarves. Others don a simple uniform, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “EAT WELL. DO GOOD.”

MAKE Café San Diego isn’t only a restaurant. It’s a workforce program for refugee and immigrant women who, in many cases, have never been employed. The program lasts three months, during which participants receive minimum wage while learning skills that will help build the confidence and experience to move on to other employment.

“We want to give them a first job,” says Anchi Mei, executive director of MAKE Projects. “So they can get a better second job and, ultimately, find a career path.”

At the end of the program, employment advisors hold mock interviews, edit resumes, and help participants plot out education plans and career goals. “If someone becomes a housekeeper, we want to help chart the path for them to become a [supervising] housekeeper,” says Samantha Forusz, the deputy director of MAKE Projects.

MAKE even prepares participants for the grueling minutiae of onboarding. “We want them to succeed, so just like everyone else, they go through the painful processes of HR the first day,” Mei says. “W4s, I-9s, the Gusto app.”

For immigrant and refugee women, this training is especially important because many are isolated by language barriers and come from agrarian backgrounds where they lacked access to formal education. Often, they are single moms trying to stay afloat after their partners were injured or killed in global conflicts.

Nimo Omar Ali is a 36-year-old mother of eight from Somalia who is married to an Uber driver. Her new income makes it possible for her family to pay rent. “It’s [also] how we feed our family and buy school supplies,” she says. After her 12-week stint at MAKE, where she has continued ESL classes, her dream is to land a job at a school cafeteria. “I love cooking,” she adds.

While MAKE doesn’t expect participants to stay in food service, they have found that making and serving food is the perfect gateway to enter the work world. “It’s a hard life,” Mei says of being a low-income immigrant. “So to be able to create joy and give joy so easily and contribute so artfully, that’s the
beauty of food as a platform for us.”

Sokyum Ou, a former participant from Cambodia, concocted the orange syrup served atop the pancakes, a mainstay of the menu. (Ou now works at Seneca in the Intercontinental Hotel downtown.) “So you have traditional buttermilk pancakes combined with a Cambodian-inspired syrup,” Mei says. “At the end of the day, this is the community and culture we are cultivating in San Diego and what our menu represents—it is globally inspired, locally sourced.”

When Lydia Adombila had the opportunity to create a weekly special, she pulled from her native Ghana, making a jollof rice to share. “At first, no one was ordering it, and I was like, ‘Oh no!’” she says. “But within a short time, so many people ordered it … Then they said, ‘We want more jollof.’ [I was] dancing, singing, ‘Jollof, jollof!’ I was so happy.”

Adombila, a 42-year-old single mother of five, completed the program and now has a part-time caregiving position while getting her GED in the hopes of becoming a nurse.

While sharing treasured recipes brings program participants joy, it has also inspired confidence. When Melida McClain moved here from Lima, starting her career from scratch and without friends or family nearby, she wasn’t prepared for what an impact it would make to see her own Peruvian dishes anticuchos and picarones—on the menu. “My name was there next to the item,” she recalls. “It felt so special—like you’re important, like you have value.”

McClain, 41, is now pursuing a yoga teacher certificate, her dream profession, while she begins her first job after MAKE at Zara in Fashion Valley.

MAKE Projects began in 2016 as Project CHOP. Women chopped carrots for school lunches, but when that endeavor lost money, they evolved into making crudité platters and then catering lunches. They dabbled in other ventures, like workshops, a farm stand, and arts and crafts, but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that they found their sweet spot. “We had to focus on one thing, it had to make money, and we had to be sure we did it well,” Mei explains.

What they came up with was serving meals at their patio café, which has now become such a success they are on the verge of a new frontier. “We are going to have our first full-time brick-and-mortar!” Mei announces.

So far, they’ve depended mostly on grants, but Mei is hoping the new space will help the social enterprise become self-sufficient, with funds coming in from CSA subscriptions, catered events, and restaurant customers. “As we grow, we will be a lot more efficient and start to scale,” she says. “It’s so exciting!”

At the new space, due to open in the former Crushed location in North Park this month, they will continue as before, but they’ll be able to expand their restaurant hours and the number of women they serve. They will no longer need to hold conferences and trainings in the stairwell of the church or in the basement while it is briefly clear of AA meetings. The garden will move to SDSU’s Mission Valley expansion where, at one acre, it will quadruple in size. (Hint: Get on their CSA waitlist now.)

While the new brick-and-mortar will look just like a typical restaurant, like the patio on 30th street, it will really be much more. “It is a vehicle for transformation and realizing human potential,” Mei says.

The post Finding Home at MAKE Café in North Park appeared first on San Diego Magazine.