Eat for Equity’s Harriet Avenue Kitchen
We work with a lot of organizations doing good work. Eat for Equity is one where the work speaks for itself. They've spent years showing what happens when food is treated as infrastructure — for equity, for small business, for a neighborhood. Right now they're trying to do something harder than run a great program: buy the building it runs out of.
We've been alongside them on this campaign, and we wanted to write honestly about why it matters.
What Eat for Equity Does
Eat for Equity builds a more equitable world through the shared power of food. Out of their Harriet Ave kitchen in South Minneapolis, that takes a few concrete forms:
Sliding-scale meal boxes — delicious, healthy, prepared food priced so it never depends on someone's budget.
Free prepared meals — 600 to 800 a week, made in partnership with Kitchen Coalition and Second Harvest Heartland and distributed to neighbors facing food insecurity.
Community feasts — public dinners that raise money for nonprofits working on local inequities.
A shared commissary kitchen — affordable, licensed space for a dozen small food businesses who need somewhere to cook at scale.
In 2025, that was over 13,200 sliding-scale meals and more than 36,000 free ones. Those numbers hold up because the people behind them show up, week after week, in a kitchen they don't own.
Twelve Businesses, One Lease
Since 2023, Eat for Equity's Harriet Avenue kitchen has been home to twelve local food businesses alongside Eat for Equity's own work — 90% of them BIPOC- or women-owned. Bakers, caterers, coffee roasters, a Trinidadian kitchen, a Mexican food truck operation. An entire small-business community, sharing one roof, on a lease.
A lease means none of that is guaranteed. Rent goes up. Buildings sell. Nettie Colón of Red Hen Gastrolab and Eat for Equity described what the space has become: "We've created a family. Our kitchen makeup is diverse, good people who work well together... it's become home." Right now, that home is still something Eat for Equity rents, not something they own.
That's what this campaign is trying to change.
The Campaign
Eat for Equity has a real, time-limited chance to buy the Harriet Avenue building outright. The goal is $350,000, split into three pieces:
Building Acquisition — $150,000, the down payment.
Infrastructure & Care — $150,000, for the refrigeration, HVAC, and dish room work the kitchen actually needs.
Sustainability & Equity Fund — $50,000, so the next round of BIPOC- and women-owned food businesses can afford to be here too.
This is a practical ask, not an abstract one. It's the difference between twelve businesses planning five years out and twelve businesses renewing a lease one year at a time. As La Tortilla, another tenant, put it: "I wish with all my heart that we can stay here and plan for the future." Ownership is what makes that possible.
Why We're In This With Them
Part of our work is helping organizations build a plan that actually gets a good case funded — not just believed. With Eat for Equity, the case was never in question. What we've worked on together is the harder, less glamorous part: sequencing the campaign, building out the public phase, and making sure the materials match the urgency of what's actually happening in that kitchen.
We don't say "co-conspirators for real change" because it sounds good. This is what we mean by it — sitting with an organization in the unglamorous middle of a campaign, doing the actual work alongside them. Eat for Equity already knows how to build a bigger table. This is their shot at owning the room it sits in.
If you want to help: you can give directly at eatforequity.org/donation. Every gift moves this forward, not just the large ones.
