What partnerships with refugees bring to the table
The Refugee Food Festival is developing a delicious recipe for innovative approaches to collaboration.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
This is a story on lessons learned from the Refugee Food Festival — and some of the key ingredients that have made it a success.
When you’re working in a restaurant kitchen, the pressure and the pace are intense, in an atmosphere of stress and sweat and some occasional swearing. Executive chefs can be strong-willed and demanding, and the work can be grueling. Yet for everything to come out exactly right — so every element of a dish is prepared at the right time and served to perfection — everyone must work as a team. For one night in New York City in 2018, a cheerful Iranian guest chef named Nasrin took charge of the kitchen in a high-end restaurant as if it were her own. Nasrin was in her element, giving orders to the executive chef like she ran the place, guiding the staff in preparing the multi-course Iranian menu she had created.
In a kitchen — and a country — that was not her own, Nasrin felt at home. And toward the end of the evening, when the restaurant’s Michelin-starred chef Antoine Westermann walked her through the dining area in her chef’s jacket to say hello to the guests, they stood in line to greet her and tell her personally what an incredible meal they had just enjoyed.
“When you think about her family’s journey and what it took for them to get here, you just feel this immense pride for her,” says Kathryn Mahoney, a Senior Communications Officer at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in New York. “You can only imagine what this moment felt like for her.”
This would be a remarkable moment for anyone, but especially for Nasrin, a refugee who fled Iran with her family (and did not want to share her last name to protect others back home). It was also one of countless remarkable moments for the Refugee Food Festival (RFF), which has grown from a relatively small but ambitious undertaking launched by two socially conscious Parisians into a global, multi-city phenomenon that demonstrates the power of creativity and risk-taking — and the essential ingredient to any successful project: collaboration.
The first of many questions: How can you use food to shift perceptions of refugees?
Convinced that food can change the world, Marine Mandrila and Louis Martin two food reporters from the NGO Food Sweet Food, founded the Refugee Food Festival, after travelling around the world to edit documentaries and stories about the food cultures, traditions and heritage. They created the RFF in Paris in 2016 because they were distressed by the negative messages the media and the public were spreading about refugees. UNHCR supported the initiative after the two co-founders contacted the Parisian office for its expertise in refugee protection.
“We strongly believe that food is one of the very few things that can connect us all around the world, and create bridges between cultures,” says Martin. “So we wanted to leverage food to create a better understanding between refugees and their hosting societies, and change the way people look at refugees. We also saw it as an opportunity to better integrate refugees into their new communities and help them secure employment.”
Martin and Mandrila organized the first RFF, which was hosted by 11 restaurants in Paris. Food Sweet Food certainly didn’t do it alone. Restaurants, project partners including UNHCR, other NGOs and volunteer citizens — not to mention the refugee chefs who helped prepare the meals — formed mission-critical partnerships.
Like any significant undertaking, the project also required funding, which initially came in part from UNHCR, which saw an opportunity to support an unconventional but promising idea. While the RFF was being developed, UNHCR’s Innovation Service — which collaborates with UNHCR country operations to find creative approaches to working with and on behalf of refugees to develop new ideas and opportunities — launched the first iteration of the UNHCR Innovation Fund. The fund provides a safe budgetary space for UNHCR to experiment with new approaches, such as the UNHCR Paris collaboration with Food Sweet Food on the RFF.
“When we launched the UNHCR Innovation Fund in 2016, we were moved by the sense of urgency of the unfolding and protracted crises with no end in sight, and we felt we needed to provide our colleagues with both financial and non-financial support to pursue some ideas that didn’t fit neatly within our typical sector program response,” says Dina Zyadeh, Associate Innovation Officer (Operations). “The Refugee Food Festival really stood out for us at the time as an ideal opportunity to begin experimenting with the fund.”
After the initial funding provided by UNHCR’s Innovation Service and Food Sweet Food internal resources, the RFF also received donations, private and public funding including from UNHCR’s Private Sector Partnership Unit in 2017 as well as UNHCR’s Europe Bureau for the 2018 edition and the development of the longer-term strategy, including an impact assessment now underway.
It was an impressive project to put together in a relatively short time-frame, which raised both operational and financial challenges, says Céline Schmitt, Spokesperson for UNHCR France and a UNHCR Innovation Fellow, a role that helped her devote an enormous amount of her time to contribute to developing the RFF across multiple countries while doing her work as a spokesperson. “UNHCR’s Innovation Service was supporting us from the start, and we began with two citizens who are experts in food and UNHCR, which is the expert in refugee protection and integration. It was not about the UNHCR brand being at the forefront but impact for the refugees at the heart of the project. It was a natural and symbiotic partnership with Food Sweet Food. ”
Organized by citizens benefiting from the support of UNHCR and other partners, the first RFF was a triumph. But in the midst of putting together a very ambitious program in a relatively short time, there was often little opportunity to think about best practices; challenges simply had to be addressed as they arose.
The success of the first edition in Paris proved the RFF was onto something — a big idea that could bring an innovative new approach to collaborating for the benefit of both refugees and host communities around the world. The inaugural team thought that if they were able to organize a Refugee Food Festival, other citizens could develop at their turn the project in their city.
Just as they had during the inaugural RFF in Paris, the team asked themselves countless questions about the best way to achieve their objectives. Some of the questions were answered as part of the natural process of problem-solving during the first three years of the event. Other questions are still being investigated while the RFF just concluded its fourth iteration in 2019, which includes the external impact assessment conducted in early 2019. (The results of the assessment will be shared in a future story in this series.)
How do partnerships make expanding a project’s scale possible?
According to Schmitt, she and Carlos Arbelaez, UNHCR’s original Refugee Food Festival Coordinator in France — and a refugee himself, whose personal experience the team felt was crucial to the project — agreed that the key to the initiative’s success is collaboration. Much like the teamwork required to create a meal in a restaurant kitchen, in fact.
“We all have different expertise to bring to this, so bringing all those actors together creates the possibility to do this,” he says.
“And it showed us that it’s possible to develop and support innovative projects — from a small initiative it really grew into something quite positive, but in order to make it possible it required a lot of both human and financial investment,” Schmitt adds.
As Arbelaez explains, the project creates a relationship between the chef in the restaurant and the refugee chef that is invited — and the guests who eat the meal they prepare. “But that’s just one part of the project, because it also involves different actors working together, like NGOs and civil society partners, local authorities in the cities where the festival is being organized, and all of us at UNHCR,” he says. “Sharing food is something very powerful, but it’s the meeting of all the people that’s the strongest part of all.”
Although Food Sweet Food drives the evolution of the RFF as the founding organization, each local festival is organized by a group of citizens who volunteer to coordinate with restaurants and other stakeholders of the project. UNHCR provided its expertise in refugee protection — support the project holders in the identification of refugees with the skills to work in a kitchen, while also making sure they remained safe when being placed in the public eye through the media. The project scaled up very quickly, but never lost its emphasis on the human component of the initiative, and on letting the unique abilities of each participant shine.
“Madrid and Athens are two examples that come to mind right away as standouts in terms of working with citizen organizers,” Zyadeh says. “In Madrid they had a civil society partner that was focused on refugee issues, and in Athens their civil society partner happened to be an event organizing company, which was really interesting.” (Watch for a story featuring the significant contributions of citizen organizers in an upcoming installment in this series.)
A central philosophy of the RFF was perhaps stated most succinctly by Eva Savvopoulou, a Senior Communications Associate in the Public Information Unit at UNHCR Greece. “The project doesn’t belong to anyone specific,” she says. “It’s the citizens, the project holders, the restaurants, the NGOs, and the refugees themselves — it belongs to everyone.”
And while the RFF is at the heart a bottom-up and citizen-led initiative, another strength of the project is the values and principles that underpin its objectives — led under the structure of Food Sweet Food. The ground-up ingredients can be adapted to each unique context but at the same time carry the core principles and spirit of the Refugee Food Festival.
As powerful as this concept is, however, it takes some coordination to bring together a project where everyone has a role to play, and perhaps has an opinion about how things should be done.
“2018 was our second year in the festival, and there was a lot more knowledge-sharing with the different cuisines of the restaurants and refugee chefs,” says Natalia Diaz, the project holder who led a team of citizen organizers in Madrid. “One Basque restaurant created a Syrian-Basque fusion dinner — they designed the menu around flavors that worked together. I hope we’ll see even more of that in the future, in terms of creative collaboration.”
In Madrid, Syrian refugee chef Noor Mahmud worked with the restaurant BaniBanoo in 2017, where she is employed to this day. In 2018, Mahmud not only helped mentor another Syrian chef at BaniBanoo — which enjoyed their Syrian dishes so much they added some of them to their regular menu — but also worked at a second restaurant, Amicis, where she and the chef created a fusion menu of Syrian and Mediterranean cuisines.
What resources are necessary to scale up a project, especially when each country is taking a unique approach?
By 2018, the RFF had expanded to 14 cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Cape Town, and San Francisco, raising new questions and diverse issues to address.
“One of the challenges we discovered during the expansion process was, how do you scale this kind of thing when you have a different citizen leading the initiative in each city and more than 100 restaurants?” says Zyadeh. “Those were the kinds of challenges we encountered along the way, and one of our main contributions was providing the financial and non-financial support for them to be able to think about scale from the get-go.”
One challenge was building the capacity of Food Sweet Food to be able to oversee a larger-scale project. According to Schmitt, UNHCR also provided assistance as they built their administrative and financial capacity and developed the flexibility to grow beyond the project’s initial scope. Although UNHCR remained involved for identifying and selecting refugee chefs for the RFF, the network that was established in France has now empowered Food Sweet Food and its partners to work more with local NGOs and refugee chefs in some cities.
“The project was growing really rapidly, with a lot of interest to bring the project to new territory, but there was also a need to have sustainable growth for the project, and that’s what we were really working on,” says Martin. “We wanted to make sure we can allocate enough resources to the organization of the project locally.”
As Mandrila adds, maintaining the original spirit of the RFF was crucial, including the personal commitment of organizers that made the first RFF so successful. “Many citizens from many, many cities want to organize their Refugee Food Festivals, but we want to go step by step and consolidate what we’ve done for now before we go at a huge scale,” she explains. “We don’t want to lose the deep objective behind our reason for doing the project in the first place.”
Building the capacity of the teams in each city was another challenge. Guidance from Food Sweet Food coordination team, supported by UNHCR was crucial, providing each team of citizens, restaurants, and refugees with advice and resources, even as they were empowered to develop their own city’s RFF in a way that made sense for their local environment.
One of the most valuable resources was a guide created — with financial support from UNHCR’s Innovation Fund — detailing the steps involved in organizing the RFF in a new city.
A decision also had to be made about how much autonomy to give to the local organizers, both in terms of the RFF and the potential to develop related projects that would carry on the concept into the future. Food Sweet Food continues to experiment with the evolution of the project, with an even greater emphasis on local collaboration.
“There is now an even greater link between the local citizens, host communities, restaurants, and refugee chefs,” says Arbelaez. “And in the kitchens we saw something really magical this past year, where there was a real bond being created between the chefs in the kitchen — a strong connection between the host communities and the chefs.”
What other challenges must be addressed, in the moment and for the future?
In some cities, not every restaurant was as receptive to working with refugee chefs as others. That made it important for citizen organizers, UNHCR, and other partners to conduct due diligence to make sure restaurants were getting involved for the right reasons — to support the mission of the RFF — rather than simply for publicity’s sake.
“Not all restaurants support refugees in the same way,” explains Edelmira Campos Núñez, Assistant External Relations Officer for UNHCR’s office in Madrid. “In 2018, our second year, we tried to work with those restaurants that were really supportive and we will continue to do so.”
One of the most significant challenges mentioned by nearly every team that organized its own RFF was how quickly each event had to be coordinated. As the project continues to evolve, everyone involved hopes more time will be built into advance planning. On one hand, hosting a second or third RFF in a specific city means a foundation has already been established from which to move forward, which can be expedient. On the other hand, tasks like arranging media promotion for the restaurants involved — a significant advantage for participating restaurants — could benefit from more advance planning.
In many cities, language differences were a challenge, but participants found innovative approaches to translations, whether within their own kitchens or with the support of UNHCR personnel. Sometimes, the solutions were particularly creative.
“In Athens, our project holder had two interns who happened to speak Arabic, so their grandmothers came to the restaurants to help,” says Savvopoulou.
“The chef and all the assistants around him helped me a lot during the preparation,” adds Barshank Haj Younes, a refugee chef from Syria who is now living in Athens. “Sometimes we communicated in Greek and other times in English. My level in English now is better.”
How do you measure success in a project that’s continually evolving, even if its initial goals remain the same?
Every restaurant involved in the RFF is a success story, in one way or another. Many were sold out on the very first day, and others added additional days to the event to accommodate more guests. Others had people lined up outside, even though there were no available tables, in hopes of getting a seat.
Of course, there is always room for improvement. But story after story reflects how well the RFF lived up to its original objectives, including finding full-time restaurant positions for some chefs and creating other opportunities to start their own food businesses.
“I was chosen from approximately 100 students to receive a scholarship from American University here in Athens, where I will learn how I can create a business and achieve my most important dream: to be a chef in my own restaurant,” says Younes.
The RFF not only gives refugees a chance to establish careers in their new home countries. It benefits the communities where they’re living — and working. Nick Cobarruvias, the co-owner and executive chef at Son’s Addition in San Francisco, had previously teamed up with La Cocina, an incubator for aspiring food entrepreneurs, and jumped at the opportunity to be part of the RFF.
“Selfishly, I like doing these things because I like to learn about other foods — any time you get a chance to work with people who have different backgrounds it’s extremely valuable. I learned how to make really good pita bread and probably the best baba ghanoush I’ve ever had in my life.”
Muna Anaee, the refugee chef working with Cobarruvias, had mostly cooked for her family back in Iraq, but she quickly became at ease in the restaurant kitchen.
“I could tell she was nervous at first, but we ended up doing a bit of mixing and matching of our cuisines and for the most part I let her take the lead,” Cobarruvias says. “It was a true collaboration but she did 90 percent of the work and did an amazing job.”
Equally important, their partnership connected Anaee to La Cocina. “Having the experience of what working in a restaurant is, they will try to help me achieve my goal of opening my own restaurant soon,” she says.
How do you determine the best opportunities for future improvement and expansion?
“We’re working on the development of a longer-term strategy,” Schmitt says. “The external impact assessment we are undertaking will tell us whether we are right or wrong in some of the things we did, but it’s also very important when we talk about innovation and what the role of UNHCR is as an incubator.”
Meanwhile, some steps forward are already being taken and new initiatives are being established.
In Paris, the RFF team is launching new projects, including the opening of a restaurant called “La Résidence du Refugee Food Festival”, where refugee chefs work from two to six months to gain in-depth experience working in a professional kitchen. The RFF team has also developed a catering activity providing events every week to refugee chefs and participates to various public cultural events all along the year. Mandrila, co-founder of the RFF, considers Paris a “laboratory” for experimentation like this.
In Athens, UNHCR and an NGO that specializes in working with refugee chefs called Food Options Lab is collaborating with chefs from the 2018 RFF to host informal monthly cookouts, usually on the rooftop of a refugee shelter.
“We want people to see this is how refugees live,” says Sudha Nair-Iliades, the citizen organizer in Athens. “We want people to see what’s beyond the headlines.
“Many of the refugee chefs were entrepreneurs in their home country so we want to create this space to follow up and accelerate the opening of more restaurants by refugee chefs,” says Martin, co-founder of the RFF. “We’ve already opened one and we want to do even more — with the goal being that every single chef who participates in the Refugee Food Festival will make a career in a restaurant.”
That trend has already begun, in fact. Nabil Attar, one of the chefs who participated in the RFF in Paris and worked at La Résidence opened his own restaurant in Orléans with the help of the RFF team. In April 2019, Magda Gegenava a chef from Georgia who spent 6 months at La Résidence, also opened her own pop-up restaurant in Paris.
Of course, continued financial support will be essential, as the organization of the festival is non-profit. The project development relies on the financial support of third parties from the public and the private sector, while the restaurant La Résidence and the catering activities contribute to self-finance the RFF. Plus, what UNHCR is learning from the RFF experience can inspire new thinking across the UNHCR organization worldwide.
“We want people to feel more rewarded for taking risks and also use it as an opportunity to document what works and what doesn’t,” says Zyadeh. “So far, it’s been a valuable experiment to see what kind of response we would get from our colleagues and learn a bit more about how they perceived innovation.”
Beyond innovation, there’s an underlying humanity at the core of the RFF that will always be a measure of its strength: a counter-narrative to the negative stories spread about refugees in nearly every country in the world.
“The festival is about reminding people who come to the restaurants that refugees are people, just like you and me,” says Martin. “Where they came from, they had a job and a house and a life, and the fact that they are working to build a new life where they are now is a very positive message — and, as Mandrila says, it’s another point of view of what is possible if we can change people’s minds and create a more welcoming environment.”
