A Job and Community Transform Refugees’ Lives

This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.

The restaurant that Emma’s Torch runs in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, advertises its mission plainly in the window: “Empowering refugees through culinary education.” The people working at this restaurant are refugees, including asylum seekers and survivors of human trafficking, and are part of the organization’s 11-week culinary training program, which pays its apprentices, who must be legally qualified to work in the United States, a living wage as they learn to work in the food industry.

The nonprofit is fittingly named after the writer Emma Lazarus, a refugee-supporting activist whose poem “The New Colossus,” a sonnet dedicated to immigrants, is engraved on the base of the Statute of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Lazarus’s oft-repeated lines go.

Kerry Brodie, the executive director of Emma’s Torch, told me that since she founded the nonprofit in 2016, it has trained over 500 students from 60 different countries, and she sees economic empowerment as its driving force. “When we welcome in new people to our communities, it’s about helping them build lives of their own choosing,” she said.

Brodie told me that when most students start at Emma’s Torch, “they’ve recently arrived in the United States and they are either entirely unemployed or severely underemployed.” The organization doesn’t just teach culinary skills — it provides additional support, such as résumé building and English classes. Emma’s Torch is also embedded in a larger network of care organizations, Brodie said, “so if somebody is working with us and we find out that they’re having housing trouble or child care or need mental health support, we’re able to mobilize that network and get them the help that they need as quickly as possible.”