Break Bread, Break Borders

Welcome to Break Bread, Break Borders. We provide catering with a cause, economically empowering refugee women from war-torn countries by teaching them cooking and entrepreneurial skills. Professionals mentor apprentices, who earn food service license certifications. BBBB’s community cooks also learn to share their powerful stories, creating a unique cultural exchange.

Jin-Ya Huang founded Break Bread, Break Borders in 2017 to honor the legacy of her late mother — chef Margaret Huang. Through food, culture, and storytelling, we break bread with the community, and break down borders at the same time.

BBBB has been chosen as a 2019 Food Justice Leader by Slow Food USA and featured in TIME Magazine as a Community Uniter in America. In 2020, Huang was selected for the prestigious Presidential Leadership Scholars program, allowing her the chance to work with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on community projects to create lasting social change.

We are committed to train refugee women from war torn countries with culinary job skills so they can find opportunities in the food service industry. BBBB is proposing a work while you train program for these women to gain access to living wages jobs. We found most food service certification tests were not offered in native languages of the refugee women, so we sought after translators to interpret the test, and located proctors who were legally certified to administer the examination. It has been the path least taken with much difficulty - but knowing this certification is good for five years and transferable throughout all of the United States gives us comfort that it is training that will aid in the empowerment of these women working to contribute to their families in the long run, and elevate positive attributes to social determinants of health for generations to come.

BBBB provides not only catering, but also innovative education and cultural exchange. Community cooks create an immersive learning experience for diners while they eat. By welcoming diners as BBBB guests sharing in cooks’ handmade traditional cuisine, BBBB develops an interactive bond between cooks and the community. BBBB community cooks provide storytelling with a purpose. Stories shared during meals educate diners. By providing catering and programming together, BBBB offers a unique competitive advantage, serving both private events and corporate diversity training. With the multiplier effect, over 60,000 have been reached in this messaging of bridge building.  

Break Bread, Break Borders uses social practice art to deliver this innovation. Through storytelling, our community cooks share with diners what their lives were like before they were refugees, where they’ve traveled, how they arrived in the United States, and how cooking through BBBB has empowered them and their families. Since 2017, women from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar and the Congo have gone through the program. We’ve created an immersive culinary experience enhancing and building compassion. As an immigrant and entrepreneur who found success in America, our founder shares her insights, inspiring other women to access economic independence despite challenges.

On-the-job catering apprenticeship: Using creative, artistic, and visual solutions like show and tell, we train women from different backgrounds about food safety despite language barriers, working with interpreters to enhance training. 

Food handlers permit: Though this permit is offered in multiple international languages, for women who do not read or write, our translators are certified proctors who properly showcase health department regulations and strictly adhere to food service regulations. 

Food managers license: Our business partner Servesafe is certified and recognized nationally, giving community cooks mobility. Alumnae food managers’ licenses are valid for five years and transferrable throughout all 50 states.

Commercial kitchen - A regular commercial kitchen typically costs $25-30/hour; BBBB pays $8 per hour. We would like to help willing organizations with kitchens get commercial grade certification so we may provide more training. 

Consumer Packaged Goods - Although it is a marketing and awareness-raising tool, catering is difficult to scale. Positive feedback on menu items like hummus, baba ganoush, and cookies made us wonder if recipes and stories could be shared through consumer packaged goods (CPG) as a social impact business. This could introduce us to larger markets, without the geographical limitations and other challenges catering presents. 

BBBB serves refugee women from war-torn countries. They already know how to cook, it’s the licensing certification, the logistics and operations of running a business and working in the commercial kitchen that requires training. So we pave the path by removing the barriers to success by building those steps for these community cooks. Regardless whether they know how to read or write, we use different teaching methods to reach them, even if we have to train only by show and tell. We have a constant loop open with refugee women to receive and incorporate feedback. For example, catering the Texas Lyceum’s board meeting at HBCU Paul Quinn College led to the creation of our first promotional video, allowing our community cooks to tell their own stories in a safe, welcoming environment. This led to more word of mouth catering business, organic press media coverage, and public speaking opportunities for our cooks, for which we provide translation services as needed. The clients we serve have input into the programs we develop. We created BBBB to provide cooks transferable skills increasing their job opportunities. 

BBBB considers intersections of the female, religious minority refugee population we educate. Most of these refugee women are married, and their tradition is to ask for their husbands’ permission to leave their children with other family or community members and earn money by working as cooks. The cooks’ lack of education, transportation, and language often impedes their opportunities to learn new job skills and earn a living wage to provide for their families and communities. We remove these barriers in order to increase refugee women’s access to opportunities, which dramatically improves the lives of their families, especially their children.

My family escaped Communist China to live in Taiwan, then Texas. My mother became an entrepreneur — hiring immigrants and refugees to work in her restaurant, training them, then sending them on to bigger, better opportunities. After losing my mom to cancer, I started Break Bread, Break Borders to honor her legacy. Initially it began as a one-time art project, as I am a social practice artist, making art to promote social progress. A local restaurant called Cafe Momentum was our community partner in sponsoring the refugee cooks from Iraq and Syria to host our pilot dinner at the Downtown location. It was meant to share global cuisine, and create a safe space for people to have tough conversations about race, gender, economic dignity and serve as stories for our communities to heal together. The women were empowered to get paid for cooking - as they did not think what they do is important cultural bridge building work. They told us while these dinners are beautiful, what they truly needed are jobs. It is through these community feedback we created the social enterprise to provide job training for this vulnerable population in the Vickery Meadows area in Dallas. 

BBBB focuses first on asylum, immigration and refugee resettlement intake policies, then on women’s childcare, transportation, finance, and educational challenges — creating dialogues among agencies to illuminate these issues. Our founder is currently in the Presidential Leadership Scholars (PLS) program, working to forge policy-making relationships making communities stronger and safer. 

Systemic change transforms a whole system, it is required when changes to one aspect of a system fail to fix the root problem. At BBBB, change is fundamental. We increase inclusion in systems including education, finance, and hospitality by increasing access to economic opportunity and paying living wages. 

Research has shown women invest 90% of their income in their families and communities — more than twice what their male counterparts give back. Investing in women is a direct pipeline with a multiplier effect redeeming our past and improving our future. Systemic change informed the creation of our social practice and our entrepreneurial ecosystems. We realize our metrics for social capital success are not the same as those which financial capital institutions use to measure and report their bottom line results. Initiating discussions is our first step toward shifting these power dynamics, which is how we seek to build equity. 

Because of our unique hybrid social enterprise structure marrying a for-profit catering and nonprofit educational program, there are fewer successful models we can follow. We are fortunate to have diverse revenue streams, but as we codify our bylaws, we need to carefully consider the size and role of our board and committee members so we can grow in ways that are not merely sustainable but also regenerative, righting old wrongs and providing a template for other social enterprises making women refugees and our whole community achieve its full potential. 

To date, BBBB empowered 20 women like Rania to gain economic independence. 80 of their family members have been impacted, and more than 9,000 people served and reached with our message. 

Central to BBBB’s model is the storytelling and compassion building, on top of our revenue being diversified and scalable. BBBB has had transformational impact with a multiplier effect, reaching thousands more people in the fifth-largest media market in the U.S. through earned media mentions. 

My background as a social practice artist means I have been investing heavily into our communities all my life here in the DFW area. All the strategic partnerships, networks of trust built, are gifts to our city to lift our neighbors to an inclusive economy. By 2050, the world is projecting to have over one billion climate refugees in the global migrant crisis. We want to share our creative solution with the communities to find economic dignity for our people. 

Most of our community cooks are from parts of the world where they speak 3 to 4 different languages by the time they arrive in the U.S. After escaping from war torn countries and living in various countries’ refugee camps, it’s a survival technique. Whether they’re from Myanmar, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Rwanda, we work closely with local refugee resettlement agencies with their translators or local volunteers to find helpers who can step in to lend a hand, in interpreting the license and certification tests with our proctors to properly train the women to understand food service standardized testing. Mentors from professional areas also step in to reinforce show and tell training in commercial kitchens for visual / hands on learners. We’ve encountered women who do not know how to read or write (from places of Taliban or Hamas rule where women and girls are not allowed education). They have equal access to the training just as everyone else does in the program - as we work hard to locate resources to teach, and we remove multiple barriers for the women to access success in this apprenticeship set up. 

BBBB community cook Rania from Darra, Syria used to lose sleep having to cook lunch for 8 people. Now, she has the confidence to cook for hundreds and as a successful entrepreneur, she has already started her own small food business thanks to her training at our organization. 

Rania often talks about how she grew in her confidence and achieved well-roundedness by going through our training program. She was giving one of these talks when she was reunited with her caseworker, Lily Espinoza, from IRC. Lily almost didn’t recognize Rania at the podium, because it was a happy woman speaking of job opportunities, how delighted she is cooking to share her food and culture with people - not the woman crying to the resettlement agency that she couldn’t find a job to help feed her family. This story came full circle when the caseworker got married, she hired us to cater her wedding. 

Rania is currently leading the group of new members in the class and training new cooks to become food managers. We’re proud that we can be role models and lead by example to show these women representation matters, and all goals have potential to achieve greatness. 

You can't hate people up close. Once you eat the food these refugee cooks made, as you break bread with the communities, you break down borders at the same time. As the women do not just drop off the food, during the storytelling, the powers of oratory skills that get passed down centuries, go to work to shift the mindsets that have been engrained in prejudices. Food is a great equalizer. It is also very political. We are using food, culture and storytelling as social justice tools to help teach people the ways of equity, anti-racism, and the eradication of xenophobia.

Our theory of change is through observing the necessities in life, and asking the community what it needs. If they ask for fire we don't bring them water. Everyone needs to eat, so why not eat with social consciousness in mind. BBBB has partnered with SMU, Southern Methodist University Hunt Institute Lyle School of Engineering, to capture the training progress along the way. We are working diligently with the Inclusive Economy team to find ways to include data from our events to test pilot programs from projects to study the consumer patterns around social enterprise offerings of food products. BBBB is committed to find social innovation in living wages for refugee women to afford a life they want to live. Much like how Henrietta Wood's reparations impacted the trajectory of her life, even although she sued for twenty thousand and only got two thousand five hundred - she and her son were able to afford a fifteen thousand dollar home and and education for him to become a prominent lawyer in the Chicago area to life them out of slavery and poverty. These are the goals we aim for our vulnerable refugee population in the Vickery Meadow community.  

Current: 8

Two years served: 22

In five years: 100

We want to pivot our business model from catering to CPG, and scale to niche markets and specialty stores. Anyway to share our stories to help more women is the goal. 

Access to capital to social impact investment. 

Capacity to hire a full time team for scope. 

Ability to afford a hybrid model - possible nonprofit to fundraise. 

Connect with organizations to network for business plan and investment.

Fundraise and hire one person at a time. 

Find a nonprofit fiscal sponsor until we can form our own 501(c)3.

SMU - HUNT research

Ignite - CultureBank funding

United Methodist - Commercial kitchen access and training

Our business model was the catering business as our main source of revenue. Train the women, work while they train. License and certification. Go on to job opportunities. But since COVID-19 our catering has been shuttered. No large gatherings means we have to pivot, thus the consumer packaged goods / CPG idea. We hope to develop a cookie box program to sell at Farmers Market, Niche locations and possibly Specialty goods stores. This way the women can still bake, make food to generate a source of income to help support their families. 

We were getting on a path of successful catering to turn a profit for the women before the pandemic. But since all staff are volunteers we are still a long way to go as a company. There have been small micro grant donations to help fund the training program, not enough to sustain the trajectory. The idea to combine above efforts and to move forward with more robust CPG product sales, form a nonprofit, or actively seek social impact investment are all possible next steps for the project.

Funds seeking projections:  

Break Bread, Break Borders: Consumer Packaged Goods Program

Item

Amount

Contract Cooks Fees

20,000

Ingredients

12,000

Training

2,000

Packaging

8,000

Marketing

2,000

Shipping

5,000

Delivery/Distribution

1,000

Total

50,000

BBBB Estimated Fixed Costs/Overhead $36,000 year

• Rent $1000

• Utility bills $500

• Phone bills/communication costs $250

• Accounting/bookkeeping $250

• Legal/insurance/licensing fees $500

• Technology $250

• Advertising & marketing $250

BBBB Estimated Variable Costs $72,000 a year

• Cost of Goods Sold

  • Materials and supplies $5000

  • Packaging $1000

Break Bread, Break Borders supports a vulnerable population of refugee women. As a part of the BIPOC community, we need support to help lift these neighbors up in order to elevate the social determinants of health in our cities. Together we can achieve economic dignity for our people in whole. 

Our goal is to scale and be in a position to help more refugee women and get them to invest more in their families and the communities. In order to do this we are seeking community partners to invest in us, whether it be in social impact investment funds, or in social capital with people to build capacity and resources to assist the refugee women - it all leads to an inclusive economy model that we want to replicate to solve the global migrant crisis. 

Chobani - mentorship and guidance on CPG

Trader Joe's / Whole Foods / Central Market - specialty foods distribution

Bank orgs for female led business grant assistance