18 REASONS
3674 18th St, San Francisco, CA 94110 www.18reasons.org

---

Organizations Filed Purposes: The mission of 18 Reasons is to empower our community with the confidence and creativity needed to buy, cook, and eat good food every day. Our vision is to create equity and belonging through the transformative and healing power of home cooking.

The mission of 18 Reasons is to empower our community with the confidence and creativity needed to buy, cook, and eat good food every day.

Our largest program, Cooking Matters, offers grocery donations called Cook-it Kits paired with free cooking and nutrition education for low-income adults, children, and families throughout California. This program is proven to increase participants consumption of healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains; decrease their consumption of junk foods like sugar-sweetened beverages and fast food; improve their health outcomes and their healthy cooking confidence; and increase their food security. Cooking Matters series consist of six 2-hour classes, which meet once a week at a CM Host location that offers other services to low-income community members (such as a food pantry, public school, community clinic, low-income housing site, etc.). Cooking Matters classes are taught by an instruction team consisting of a Chef Educator, a Nutrition Educator, and a Class Assistant. Two types of instructors fill these roles: volunteers and peer health educators. Peer health educators are low-income adult graduates of our Cooking Matters program whom we train for 9 weeks in classroom facilitation, learner-centered teaching practices, and cooking and nutrition instruction. Because our classes are taught by our participants peers role models who have faced the same barriers to healthy eating that they have our Cooking Matters classes are more effective and more culturally appropriate for our participants. Our peer health educator program is a key part of our core value of Liberation, which seeks to empower low-income communities from within. Our Cooking Matters program employs a corps of 38 trained peer health educators, engages 200 volunteers passionate about healthy food access, and partners with a network of 300 CM Host agencies serving low-income residents. In 2019, we hosted more than 2,000 Cooking Matters classes, reaching more than 2,700 low-income households. With the support of translators provided by our CM Host partners, 18 Reasons has offered Cooking Matters classes in languages as diverse as Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Mam, and Tigrinya. Our peer health educator program employs a mix of English speakers and Spanish speakers, which allows 18 Reasons to deliver Cooking Matters programming in either of these languages, including providing English or Spanish curriculum, surveys, and recipes, without the need for a translator. 18 Reasons is proud to offer evidence-based, effective food skills education to low-income community members. Each Cooking Matters graduate takes a validated survey designed by the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition and national anti-hunger nonprofit Share Our Strength at the beginning and end of their program. This survey measures participants food insecurity, their behaviors and attitudes related to healthy eating, and their healthy cooking confidence. In our most recent data, our participants reported increased consumption of healthy foods, with 74% of graduates eating more vegetables, 78% eating more fruit, and 88% prepping healthy meals more often at home. Participants reported a consuming 52% fewer sugar-sweetened beverages such as soda and an 85% increase in drinking water. Finally, participants were able to access more healthy food by learning to stretch their existing food budget: 68% reported planning meals ahead of time and shopping with a grocery list more often to save money at the store, 97% used the nutrition facts label more often, and 87% felt confident that they could swap less healthy ingredients in their favorite recipes for healthier ingredients of the same or a lesser cost.Through our Cooking Matters program, 18 Reasons increases healthy food access for our low-income participants by pairing food distribution with hands-on culinary, nutrition, and food resource management education. After completing a Cooking Matters series, 77% of participants feel that they can afford to buy more fruits and vegetables using their existing food budget as a result of the food shopping skills they have learned. As a baseline, food insecurity in the Bay Area drops by 1% each year as the wealth in our area grows, whereas 18 Reasons is able to reduce food insecurity among our low-income participants by 12% in just 6 weeks because of the food skills we teach. In 2019, we distributed over 25,000 pounds of groceries through our Cooking Matters classes, and we are on track to significantly increase that number with each year that passes.

Our second-largest program is our 18th Street Kitchen, where we offer hands-on cooking classes, cheesemaking and fermentation workshops, dinners with farmers and food producers, wine tasting seminars, and just about anything we can think of that will help our community become more excited about cooking and eating good food every day. This program is closely aligned with our core value of Learning: our 18th Street Kitchen students are on a journey to learn about world cuisines, food traditions, home cooking, and social issues related to our food system. Over 2,000 people attended events at our 18th Street Kitchen last year. These programs are offered on a fee-for-service basis, with scholarships for low-income community members available for each class. All proceeds from 18th Street Kitchen programs benefit our largest program, our free Cooking Matters program for low-income families.

---

---

Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202003009349300030_public.xml