Since launching in 2015,The Town Kitchenhas extradite 100,000 meals to offices in the Bay Area . The offerings are what you ’d gestate from a lunch rescue armed service catering to Silicon Valley clientele : Items like vegan quinoa bowls , summer salad , and char tuna rotate through the carte du jour on a seasonal cornerstone . But it ’s what ’s run on behind the scenes that ’s attractingnational attending .

CEO Sabrina Mutukisna co - founded The Town Kitchen as a way to provide chore chance to at - endangerment youth . The Oakland - based kitchen is staffed with local workers aged 15 to 25 who face disadvantages that can make it hard for them to follow traditional vocation track . Many of the business ’s employees arrive from foster homes or swear out metre in prison house .

A job at The Town Kitchen not only provides modal wages of $ 15.65 an hour — a paycheck well above the national average for food - service proletarian — but career - construction resources as well . The business partner with San Francisco State University to offer workforce training programs to its staff fellow member , and collaborates with local organization aim at undertake related to employment hurdles such as housing and transportation . Today , 90 percent of The Town Kitchen ’s workforce is also working toward a college degree .

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The juvenility program is just one way the party gives back to the Bay Area . The ingredients that go into their artisanal boxed lunch number from local establishment base by women and/or people of people of color . And as part of the partnership , provider agree to hire employees from The Town Kitchen ’s calling programme .

The Bay Area is an appropriate setting for the experiment : gamy living accommodations monetary value and a free-enterprise job marketprevent many low - skill actor from wax out of impoverishment . Mutukisna plans to add the conception to Seattle next and eventually set up kitchen in every major city in the U.S.