Bringing people together to celebrate, mourn, pay tribute, and experience joy: it’s all part of queer culture and food culture.
How can people connect the two? The Queer Food Foundation (QFF) is a place to start.
In July 2020, Vanessa Parish, Jona Beliu, Mavis-Jay Sanders and Gabrielle Lenart founded QFF as a mutual resource. While lavish and cheerful dinner parties are a well-known part of queer history, several studies have shown that LGBTQ+ Americans today experience food insecurity at significantly higher rates than non-LGBTQ+ people. Feeding America says this is partly due to increased poverty rates within the community, making its members twice as likely as others to go hungry.
What started with these four industry professionals – the majority based in New York – wanting to use their culinary skills to address inequality has since grown into a non-profit hub with a 25-person board of directors. (Sanders and Beliu are no longer actively involved with the foundation and Lenart currently serves as an advisor.)
“We started during the George Floyd movement,” Parish, now executive director of QFF, tells TODAY.com. He adds that the team is very proud of their founding story.
Then, in 2021, the foundation began forming a board of directors, which Parish says was when things really took off. “We started making project plans,” she explains, citing the Queer Food Directory as one of the first major efforts. The directory is an online database for LGBTQ+ people in and around the food industry to find talent, restaurants, and more within the community.
“People want to know which companies to support and who to hire,” she says, adding that connecting these companies is “the fun part” of what they do.
Parish says the idea came when the team realized that in the early days of the foundation, they were meeting so many people in the industry and many of them didn’t know each other. They thought, “Let’s create a place where people can find each other.”
The Queer Food Fund was their next big project. “Every Black History Month we do a mutual aid project that helps Black queer and trans people,” Parish says, adding that the money goes directly “into their pockets.”
In its first three years, the fund raised and distributed about $45,000, with $10,000 in 2021 and $20,000 in 2023. Each recipient gets $100. This year, the fund raised significantly less — $5,000, according to Parish — but was still able to reach 50 people. Parish believes the current political climate and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation played a role.
“On top of that, companies are laying off their DEI staff left and right,” Parish says. “The DEI staff that would normally find us and support our causes.”
She also says many of the smaller LGBTQ+ and food organizations that have donated in the past have closed this year due to lack of funding. And when it comes to individual donors, their wallets have been hit too.
“With inflation, mutual aid is hard,” Parish explains via text. “The simple answer is that the people who normally send mutual aid (middle class) can barely afford groceries themselves.”
However, mutual aid remains an important focus for QFF.
“I think big nonprofits forget smaller acts,” Parish continues. “We didn’t want to get rid of that – our foundation of mutual aid.”
James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Telly Justice says mutual aid is an “essential” part of the queer community.
The co-owner of New York City fine-dining restaurant HAGS incorporated the pay-per-view Sundays into the business plan, adding that it felt “natural” for the team to offer their skills to their community and the East Village neighborhood in an accessible way.
“Mutual aid is a natural impulse to care for those around you, knowing that if and when you need a helping hand, help will be available to you too,” Justice tells TODAY.com via text message.
While small-scale fundraising is the backbone of QFF, Parish says business consulting – “we’re very intentional about the companies and businesses we connect with” – and community involvement have become an equal part of the mission.
The organization partners with the James Beard Foundation to host virtual educational panels for niche groups within the industry, like LGBTQ+ cookbook authors, food photographers, and more. For panels, Parish says she tries to feature people from different regions of the U.S. (Midwest, South, Northwest) — “that way we get a nice perspective from different places.”
They are also working to expand into food policy, working with agricultural organizations such as Black Farmer Fund. “We meet other organizations with the same goals and missions, and we join forces, so to speak,” Parish says, adding that they prefer to help organizations with existing programming rather than create their own.
“It’s more about, ‘How can we support your programming and integrate queer people who need that support into that programming? How can we find statistics that we can add to your statistics?’” she explains.
Working with community refrigerators and soup kitchens, and helping restaurants find donation centers for their surplus food, are also all part of the foundation’s mission. They’ve also helped spread the word about community events and outreach opportunities, like Queer Soup Night, where people come together, pay what they can and enjoy different soups from chefs in cities across the country.
If an organization or company wants to get mutual aid, Parish says it’s not as intimidating as it seems.
“Start small,” she says. “I think when people hear ‘mutual aid’ and ‘donation,’ they think of a lot of money because they see these big nonprofits and they make announcements like, ‘We raised $5 million in our fundraising campaign.'” She wants that people do that. Understand that these numbers take time, and instead, think small. “That’s kind of where the community comes in.”
Parish calls HAGS’ Sunday program a form of mutual aid and says other small businesses can use it as an example of how to operate in the space. “I think people have a hard time recognizing what their place in the community can be, but it can be as simple as what works in your model,” she says. For small businesses that “don’t have the ability to donate money all the time,” figuring out how to do that can help is more important than they think.
The most important part of mutual aid, Parish says, is a concept she only recently learned.
QFF board member and mutual aid activist Superior Murphy has provided insight into the unspoken protocol in the room. When it comes to giving, “Don’t ask,” Parish explains what she learned from Murphy. “They say they need $100, they need $100. That is it.”
For Parish and her team, leaving demographic and identity data out of the mutual aid distribution process was an adjustment. So for the annual Black History Month fundraiser, they don’t ask for proof of race, gender, or whether the money is specifically spent on food that month.
“Most people who are food insecure also have insecurities somewhere else,” Parish explains. “So maybe they don’t need the $100 to go grocery shopping this week, but they might need $100 to spend somewhere else because they bought groceries.”
When the QFF team was asked the age-old question “Where do you see yourself in five years?” their response was always: “We shouldn’t have to exist anymore.” But now she sees the long-term value of the work and how it can change shape. “I would like to exist, but more as a supplement — not as a necessary resource.”
Today, QFF board members are located throughout the US
“Everyone has different needs,” she says. In New York City, for example, she says, it’s not so much a matter of finding the LGBTQ+ people in the industry — “everyone knows where we are” — but rather a matter of how to keep their support systems going. “While in the south they don’t know each other,” Parish continues. “A lot of them haven’t even come out yet. A lot of places are friendly, but they don’t offer support,” so it’s about creating that ecosystem and helping them get started.
How can people get involved with QFF?
Parish says volunteering and making small donations are great places to start, but spreading the message has an even bigger impact.
“Tell people that we are here, that we are there for them,” she says. “This mutual aid doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s because people are talking about it and creating awareness for it.” Letting people “use the power of social media is extremely helpful.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
