Throughout the past month, we checked in with our 2025 grantees to learn how their funded programs, projects, and initiatives are progressing – and to better understand the impact they’re making across Los Angeles. Now, we are excited to share these interviews, with stories of growth, challenges, and community transformation. [Find each of their stories here.]

KIWA and Inclusive Action for the City received funding through the LA2050 Grants Challenge from the Goldhirsh Foundation to support the Restaurant Equity Alliance, a collaborative coalition and policy campaign working to raise labor standards, support small businesses, and build a more just restaurant economy in Los Angeles. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation with their team.

Interview Participant:

Brady Collins, Director of Research and Policy at KIWA

Luz Castro, Associate Director of Policy at Inclusive Action for the City

Amy Chong, Senior Associate of Policy at Inclusive Action for the City

LA2050: Through the Restaurant Equity Alliance, you are bringing together workers, small business owners, and policy makers to reshape Los Angeles’ restaurant industry. How does this coalition-based approach help address income inequality and build shared power across groups that are often siloed?

KIWA & IAC: At the heart of the Restaurant Equity Alliance is the understanding that workers and small business owners are often facing different versions of the same precarity. On one hand, immigrant entrepreneurs and community-serving restaurants are under growing pressure from displacement, corporate consolidation, and competition from chains and franchises with far greater access to capital. On the other, restaurant workers are often stuck in a low-wage industry where many need multiple jobs to make ends meet, and where exploitation too often becomes part of the business model. Our coalition’s approach challenges the idea that these groups must always be on opposite sides. Instead, it creates space to identify shared interests, shared concerns, and a shared stake in building a healthier industry.

What makes this collaboration powerful is that it brings together complementary expertise. KIWA contributes deep experience in worker organizing, while Inclusive Action brings a strong background in small business support and economic justice. Together, our organizations are building a space that does not often exist in traditional policy-making: one where workers, small business owners, and policymakers can shape solutions together. Our coalition is also thinking proactively about what lies ahead, including the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, and how to ensure those events strengthen local communities rather than deepen inequality. In a city where food is such a central part of cultural life, the goal is not only to preserve the quality of Los Angeles’ restaurants, but to improve the quality of the jobs and businesses that sustain them.

LA2050: Your work spans organizing, policy development, and direct support for workers and small businesses. As you’ve begun building the Restaurant Council and advancing this campaign, what challenges have you encountered, and what early progress or momentum are you seeing?

KIWA & IAC: One major challenge has been navigating how slow, unclear, and complicated [Los Angeles] city policy processes can be. Timelines for motions and ordinances are not always clearly communicated, and that lack of structure can make it difficult to build momentum, especially for community members who are not used to working within City Hall. For workers and small business owners already experiencing instability, those delays can reinforce a sense that the city does not care or that participation will not lead to meaningful change. Our coalition has also had to think carefully about what kind of Restaurant Council it wants to build: whether it should begin as a more formal body with city involvement and potential enforcement authority, or whether it should start more informally and grow over time. At the same time, fear in the industry has intensified in the face of immigration enforcement, making it harder to recruit people into a public-facing effort.

Even with those challenges, our coalition is seeing real momentum. Small business owners and restaurant workers are eager to organize, engage, and shape policy that reflects their lived experience. Research on the impact of the World Cup on the restaurant industry has become an especially useful organizing tool, helping spark conversations with restaurant owners and workers about the pressures they are already experiencing and what needs to change before even larger events arrive. Those conversations are also helping recruit participants into the emerging Restaurant Council. Together, we see this as early evidence that the Alliance can grow into a meaningful and lasting structure for representation, collaboration, and policy development.

LA2050: What do you hope to achieve in the last six months of the grant, and how can the broader LA2050 community support?

KIWA & IAC: One of our coalition’s biggest goals is to formally convene the Restaurant Council and hold its first meetings. That moment is significant because it represents the culmination of many months of organizing, outreach, and relationship-building across a fragmented industry. We see the council as an important vehicle for turning shared concerns into lasting policy ideas and collective action. They are also continuing to advance the broader campaign, deepen research tied to the World Cup and Olympics, and refine their long-term strategy for how restaurant workers and small business owners can shape the future of the industry together.

The broader LA2050 community can support this work in a few meaningful ways. One is through connections: our coalition is interested in meeting other LA2050 grantees and organizations working within related small business, workforce, and policy ecosystems, since those conversations could spark new ideas and partnerships. Another is through communications support. As the Restaurant Council begins to convene, our coalition wants help documenting and sharing why that gathering matters, even if the visible outcome is simply a group of people sitting in a room together. For us, that room represents months of organizing and the possibility of a more equitable future for Los Angeles’ restaurant industry.

Photo Credit: KIWA