A visit to Cafewal

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

Leading up to the holidays, I visited the new Cafewal (Fulani for cafeteria) located in ELIM House of Worship, 602 E. 12th St. at Avenue B. EVLovesNYC rents space and a kitchen there to provide daily hot meals, showers, assistance, and information, as well as a community for asylum seekers, with a focus on offering free services for immigrants from West Africa.

Cafewal serves a daily weekday lunch at 12:30 p.m. to anyone who shows up (and all are welcome). I am greeted by Executive Director Tyler Hefferon, who shows me around the space and explains its origins.

"The new kitchen is an expansion of our restaurant training program that began last spring as an effort to provide asylum seekers with certified letters stating that they were volunteering with our organization, an important piece of paper that contributed to a barbaric point system engineered by New York City of qualifying extenuating circumstances and aided in the prevention of single adults being kicked out of the NYC shelter system every 30 days and left with no place to sleep," he said.

We discuss how the program works and its training component to assist the newest New Yorkers with job skills. 

"The meals are prepared to meet EVLovesNYC's standards — nutrient-dense, culturally sensitive, and absolutely delicious. The kitchen provides much-needed hot meals to our neighbors and assists our chefs by providing their first NYC kitchen experience to add to their resumes, plus the technical and organizational skills required by the fast-paced NYC hospitality industry," Hefferon said. "We are thrilled that many program participants have progressed through the asylum process to the point of receiving their federal work authorization and are searching for their first jobs in the United States, with some individuals apartment hunting and exiting the shelter system."

To date, since the spring of 2020, EVLovesNYC has provided over 585,000 hot meals and 8.4 million pounds of groceries to food-insecure New Yorkers, Hefferon says, and the costs have been difficult to keep up with, as the 3,600 hot meals per week cost between $3 and $4 each. The organization is funded solely by small-dollar donations and corporate sponsors.

If you’d like to donate — you can do so here.