This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.
The restaurant that Emma’s Torch runs in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, advertises its mission plainly in the window: “Empowering refugees through culinary education.” The people working at this restaurant are refugees, including asylum seekers and survivors of human trafficking, and are part of the organization’s 11-week culinary training program, which pays its apprentices, who must be legally qualified to work in the United States, a living wage as they learn to work in the food industry.
The nonprofit is fittingly named after the writer Emma Lazarus, a refugee-supporting activist whose poem “The New Colossus,” a sonnet dedicated to immigrants, is engraved on the base of the Statute of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Lazarus’s oft-repeated lines go.
Kerry Brodie, the executive director of Emma’s Torch, told me that since she founded the nonprofit in 2016, it has trained over 500 students from 60 different countries, and she sees economic empowerment as its driving force. “When we welcome in new people to our communities, it’s about helping them build lives of their own choosing,” she said.
Brodie told me that when most students start at Emma’s Torch, “they’ve recently arrived in the United States and they are either entirely unemployed or severely underemployed.” The organization doesn’t just teach culinary skills — it provides additional support, such as résumé building and English classes. Emma’s Torch is also embedded in a larger network of care organizations, Brodie said, “so if somebody is working with us and we find out that they’re having housing trouble or child care or need mental health support, we’re able to mobilize that network and get them the help that they need as quickly as possible.”
Lately, she has seen a particular influx of refugees from Venezuela, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Haiti. Emma’s Torch has restaurants in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., and the organization is planning to open a catering facility in 2025. The team’s work is so essential that all their training locations have long wait lists, and they’re trying to grow as quickly as possible to serve those aspirants. I talked to one recent graduate who is originally from Venezuela, Annira Cusati. She is now employed as a pastry cook at Ci Siamo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Ms. Cusati said the experience was amazing for her, and her enthusiasm bubbled over the phone.
One of the organization’s first graduates, Mazen Khoury, who came from Syria, opened a Syrian Korean fusion restaurant called SYKO in 2022, which got a rave review from The New Yorker’s restaurant critic Hannah Goldfield last year. She said that a sandwich called the Fatboy — which includes a scallion pancake, rice, pickled daikon and your choice of protein — is one of the best things she’s ever eaten.
You can support Emma’s Torch by going to one of its restaurants, donating or buying a holiday gift box filled with goodies made by the students. The existence of Emma’s Torch feels particularly bright to me in this moment, when demonizing immigrants is a dominant and ugly part of our political discourse, and refugees in Springfield, Ohio, have been menaced by bomb threats and other forms of intimidation.
Ms. Brodie told me she often goes back to Emma Lazarus’s poem as a guiding light. “The idea that at the core of who we are as a country and who we aspire to be is the ability to welcome in the stranger. And that might sometimes feel like it’s harder to hold onto, but right now, that’s something that we’re really clinging to.”
This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
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