An Emerging Culinary, Culture & Community Foundation

About This Emerging Culinary, Culture & Community Foundation (The Foundation's name will be revealed to candidates selected for interviewing)

The Foundation is a Harlem-based, community-centered cultural institution dedicated to preserving, advancing, and activating the foodways of African Americans and the broader African Diaspora as systems of knowledge, cultural authority, and economic opportunity.

Founded by a James Beard Award-winning chef, restaurateur, author, and cultural activist, the Foundation is building the infrastructure to document, interpret, and sustain one of the world’s most influential yet underrecognized bodies of cultural knowledge.

WHO WE ARE

The Foundation is a Harlem-rooted nonprofit institution dedicated to preserving, advancing, and activating the foodways of African Americans and the broader African Diaspora as systems of knowledge, cultural authority, and economic opportunity.

Before it is anything else, The Foundation is a place of gathering. Around the table, history is not abstract; it is tasted, remembered, and shared. Recipes carry the imprint of migration, survival, and ingenuity. Techniques passed hand to hand become a living archive. In these moments, food is more than nourishment; it is a language of belonging, a record of where we have been, and a guide to who we are becoming.

The Foundation exists to hold, codify, and advance that knowledge with intention. Through public programming, performance, dialogue, archival work, and education, the Foundation ensures that the people who have always carried this knowledge remain at the center of how it is practiced, transmitted, and sustained.

Founded by a James Beard Award–winning chef, restaurateur, author, artist, and food activist, the Foundation builds on decades of work at the intersection of culinary arts, music, and Black cultural heritage. That body of work now takes form as something enduring: a platform that not only preserves tradition but builds pathways for ownership, authorship, and opportunity.

This work begins at the table, but it does not end there.

THE PROBLEM WE EXIST TO SOLVE

The foodways of the African American and broader African Diaspora have shaped global cuisine, agriculture, and culture. However, the systems that document, teach, and resource knowledge have not been designed to reflect or carry their full depth, authorship, and authority.

This knowledge lives in people, passed through practice, memory, and lived experience. Without intentional structures designed to hold, codify, and advance it on its own terms, it remains vulnerable to extraction, distortion, or loss.

The Foundation exists to build those structures, ensuring this knowledge is held, codified, and advanced by those to whom it belongs.

A Board of Directors of nationally recognized leaders in philanthropy, civic leadership, hospitality, the arts, and corporate and nonprofit governance governs the Foundation. Incorporated in Delaware in April 2025 and recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3), the Foundation has operated under fiscal sponsorship with the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY) since April 1, 2026. This partnership enables the Board and leadership to focus on institutional development, strategic planning, partnership cultivation, and public humanities program design, while FCNY provides financial management, grants administration, accounting, compliance oversight, contracting support, payroll administration, and related operational services during the Foundation's formative phase.