Beyond the food, it’s really about community.
Read the full article at LA Taco
In April, Acedera began partnering with Eayikes and LACAN to bring much-needed aid to the unhoused residents of Skid Row. She says the early April video that Skid Row Power posted of Donna is what led to the collaboration.
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“This is the end of week four. It’s been crazy man,” said Alex Yoon, Executive Director of Eayikes—an educational non-profit that motivates people to move towards community service, “There are a lot of people that have good hearts but just don’t know how to accept that.”
Over the past seven years, Alex and the team behind Eayikes have been building their non-profit. When the pandemic hit and the mayor announced “safer-at-home”orders, they partnered with Acedera to create a logistics team of hundreds of volunteers that handle everything from preparing meals to distributing them, Yoon explains, as pairs of people shuffled tables of brown bag lunches, so heavy they caused the tables to bend, from a staging room to the front entrance of LACAN. Together with Acedera and 10 other “chefs”, Eayikes contributed over 200 meals on Sunday.
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The heightened demand for food has made a job that is already sometimes difficult on the body, economically taxing and morally daunting, that much more grueling but at the end of the day, Acedera feels rewarded knowing that she’s making a difference in people’s lives. “Beyond the food, it’s really about community. I want to make sure that they know that someone cares about them,” Acedera said in February.
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As the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, Acedera grew up in a big family in Los Angeles. From an early age she learned that “everybody needs to get fed” and idolized her grandmothers who she says were all entrepreneurs in some way. She recalls her family always taking in new arrivals and cooking for other people. In Acedera’s family – as well as her current circle of food advocates – it’s the women that keep everybody’s bellies full, “Most of the people I work with are women,” Acedera told L.A. Taco in February while on the way to pick up produce from an artist and food advocate in Highland Park.
