18 REASONS

Our mission is to empower our community with the confidence and creativity to buy, cook, and eat good food every day. Our vision is to create equity and belonging through the transformative and healing power of home cooking.

To achieve our mission, we offer two food education programs: our 18th Street Kitchen program, which raises money through ticket sales, caters to an audience of community-minded foodies; and our Cooking Matters program, which offers free, hands-on cooking and nutrition education paired with grocery donations for low-income families.

Our Cooking Matters program specifically focuses on low-income individuals who need free resources and strategies to help them shop for and prepare healthy food on a limited budget. Our program is proven to increase participants' consumption of fruits and vegetables, decrease consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, decrease their food insecurity scores, and increase the time they spent planning and cooking meals together with their families.

Our 18th Street Kitchen offers cooking education and other food-related events (film screenings, wine pairing classes, community dinners, and more) for paying students as well as students supported by our scholarship fund. Our goal with these programs is, as with Cooking Matters, to increase home cooking and food skills and to bring our community together around a shared table.

Collaboration: 18 Reasons partners with over 100 nonprofits and agencies each year to deliver the Cooking Matters program to our target audience in an environment that is already familiar to our participants. Partners include public schools, affordable housing sites, clinics, community centers, and more.

Multiplier effect: 99% of our graduates share what they learned in our programs with people at home. Our target audience, low-income caregivers of young children, can multiply the power of our intervention by changing their habits to ensure a healthier next generation.

Peer health education: We train low-income community members, mostly women of color, to become Peer Health Educators and deliver programming in their own communities. This program offers disadvantaged people valuable training in cooking, nutrition, and facilitation skills. Peer Health Educators make our curriculum all the more relevant and compelling for our participants, who share linguistic and cultural ties with their teachers.

18 Reasons employs a diverse and talented staff, and we have a deeply committed Board. The Board’s oversight of our organization is undergirded by their professional excellence across a wide array of fields: finance, nonprofit management, business administration, wealth management, program strategy, community organizing, and more. Our staff capacity is supplemented by our 800 volunteers and our 40 trained Peer Health Educators. Our programs are evidence-based, and we participate in comprehensive and rigorous program evaluation to make sure we are achieving our mission.

We have proven the value of our programs to our community of supporters, and we are proud of our diverse funding streams, including individual donations, government and foundation grants, and the innovative fee-for-service model at our 18th Street Kitchen. We have strong cash flow and emergency reserves, should they be needed. Our facilities include our 18th Street Kitchen space, which features a full commercial kitchen and 15 mobile kitchen units that we use to teach Cooking Matters in community settings.

Annually, we now reach over 3,500 students through Cooking Matters and over 2,000 students through our 18th Street Kitchen. Our graduates consistently report significant and lasting healthy behavior changes as a result of our classes. We are recognized for our thought leadership in food justice. We are members of multidisciplinary coalitions fighting for equitable services and policies such as County Nutrition Action Partners, the Oakland Food Policy Council, Shape Up San Francisco, and many more. Members of our staff recently received the Good Neighbor award from the Golden State Warriors and the Spirit of Philanthropy Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

As we look toward the future, we plan to expand our state-wide satellite program, through which we operate Cooking Matters in partnership with CA agencies outside of our organization's Bay Area geographical scope. We also plan to expand our programmatic offerings for low-income parents, recent immigrants, and at-risk youth, all of whom are at a time of life when they are likely to make healthy lifestyle changes.