What If We Gave People Jobs Instead of Excuses? Lisbon's Model and What LA Should Adopt
The difference between feeding someone and teaching them to feed themselves is everything. Visual by deluxmultimedia
Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund of SecondGrace.LA
Last week I wrote about the IGH Vanguard Cities report and the uncomfortable contrast between 11 cities making progress on homelessness and LA cutting $200 million from its budget. Several of you asked which city I'd dig into first. The answer was almost unanimous: Lisbon.
I get it. Lisbon does something most homelessness programs don't attempt. It builds a bridge from the street to meaningful work, using restaurants as the vehicle.
A Restaurant Where the Staff Are the Mission
In 2019, the Lisbon NGO CRESCER opened É Um Restaurante (literally, "It Is a Restaurant") in one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods. People experiencing homelessness cook and serve the food. They receive certified culinary training, psychosocial support, and a pathway to permanent employment in Lisbon's broader hospitality industry.
CRESCER's executive director, Américo Nave, told the European Social Network:
"What normally happens is people feeding homeless people. What we propose is that homeless people feed the community."
That inversion reframes the experience. A volunteer isn't handing someone a plate. Instead, they're now a customer, sitting down to a meal prepared for them, in a restaurant run by people who are rebuilding their lives — and you're paying because the food is good. Consultant chef Nuno Bergonse helped build a menu that stands on its own. This is fine dining in a global city that also supports the community.
By 2022, participants had prepared over 62,000 meals. 68% were integrated into the broader job market. CRESCER has since expanded to four locations and a catering operation, training roughly 75 new people per year.
The program sits on top of CRESCER's Housing First initiative, É Uma Casa. Among 172 people housed: health system engagement went from 17% to 71%, substance use dropped from 90% to 45% with no sobriety requirement, and medication adherence went from 10% to 96%. Nobody forced compliance. The stability itself was the intervention.
Isn't This Just Like the Refettorio?
Some of you may be thinking of Massimo Bottura's Refettorio model — the beautiful community kitchens his Food for Soul nonprofit has opened in Harlem, San Francisco, Paris, and a dozen other cities. Bottura has long had LA on his list. But the Refettorio and the Lisbon model serve different purposes.
Refettorios are community kitchens where celebrity chefs transform surplus food into dignified meals for people in need. They fight food waste and social isolation, and they do it beautifully. But their guests are diners — the people being served are receiving a meal, not building a career.
É Um Restaurante flips that relationship. The people who were recently homeless are the ones doing the cooking and serving, training for permanent jobs in the hospitality industry, and earning wages while they learn. The paying customers are the general public. One model feeds people with dignity. The other employs people with dignity. LA needs both, but what we're missing is the second one.
Why LA Needs This Now
LA's restaurant industry is in crisis, and it's not just the usual post-pandemic headwinds. A February 2026 report from the LA County Department of Economic Opportunity and LAEDC documented what restaurant owners have been living through: 82% of surveyed businesses reported negative impacts from immigration enforcement, with 44% losing over half their revenue. 70% experienced staffing shortages. 33% said workers were afraid to report to work.
The LA Times reported that a confluence of setbacks led to dozens of closures in 2025, including Papa Cristo's, Guerrilla Tacos, and Here's Looking at You. One restaurateur told the paper that his head of kitchen prep self-deported after a home raid, his dishwasher left after his brother was arrested at a bus stop, and the remaining staff is burned out covering for them. In Boyle Heights, multiple restaurants reported losing 50% or more of their customers. The California Restaurant Association called the industry's position "very volatile."
Nationally, 70% of restaurant operators report job openings they can't fill. Full-service restaurants remain 228,000 jobs below pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, we have tens of thousands of people who need meaningful employment and a path back to stability. We keep treating these as separate problems. Lisbon didn't.
We Already Have the Building Blocks
LA has proof of concept for social enterprise employment — just not assembled into a Lisbon-style pipeline.
Homeboy Industries has been running restaurant-based social enterprises for over 30 years (the Bakery, Homegirl Café, a diner at City Hall, a café at LAX) and nearly 70% of the people entering their program are experiencing homelessness. But Homeboy's primary focus is formerly incarcerated and gang-involved individuals.
Up in San Francisco, Hayes Valley Bakeworks has operated since 2012 as a social enterprise café where people with disabilities, people who are homeless or at risk, and formerly incarcerated individuals learn every facet of the food service business, front counter included. It's run by the nonprofit Toolworks, charges competitive prices (no altruism premium), and 100% of profits go back into the mission. It's a small operation, but it proves the model works in a real commercial setting.
The Hospitality Training Academy, through UNITE HERE Local 11, runs a free 8-week culinary apprenticeship that places graduates in union jobs at hotels and restaurants across LA. Their executive director has said openly that some students come directly from shelters. Chrysalis has helped over 90,000 people find jobs since 1984, including through its SECTOR program that partners with hospitality-sector training providers. The Downtown Women's Center runs MADE by DWC, a social enterprise providing 12-month paid employment with front-of-house training. And LA:RISE connects over 40 social enterprises to the county workforce system, having placed 4,700 people in permanent jobs over the past decade.
What's missing is a single place that combines all of these elements: a social enterprise restaurant that trains people recovering from homelessness in full-spectrum hospitality work (cooking, serving, hosting, bartending) while generating revenue, connecting to the existing workforce infrastructure, and building on Housing First.
Money on the Table
Most employers don't know this, but there's real financial support available for hiring people experiencing homelessness.
California's Homeless Hiring Tax Credit (HHTC): $2,500 to $10,000 per employee in state tax credits, up to $30,000 per year, through December 2026.
Federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC): Up to $9,600 per hire (expired December 2025; CA is accepting applications pending reauthorization).
Transitional Subsidized Employment through the South Bay Workforce Investment Board: Can fully subsidize wages for up to eight months.
LA:RISE: Provides 3 to 12 months of paid transitional employment through partner social enterprises.
For restaurant owners struggling with the staffing crisis: there are people ready to work, programs ready to train them, and money available to offset the cost of hiring. The connections just need to be made.
The Olympics Opportunity
In two years, LA hosts the world. The county's strategy is to clear encampments near Olympic venues, with no new funding to house displaced residents. Instead of seeing these people as problems to hide, let's double down on our efforts to move people into workforce programs.
Imagine that LA invested in a network of social enterprise restaurants that gave unhoused residents a path to employment in the very industry that will need thousands of additional workers to serve Olympic visitors. Imagine the story we could tell: we didn't hide our neighbors, we hired them.
That's the Lisbon model applied to LA's reality. Cities with fewer resources are already doing it. We just have to want it badly enough to build it.
Getting Started
If you're a restaurant owner, chef, hospitality professional, or someone in workforce development and this resonates, I want to hear from you. At SecondGrace.LA, we're building the connective tissue between ideas like this and the people who can make them real.
Next week: Buenos Aires — the city that redesigned its entire homeless response system during an economic crisis, and what their no-exclusion approach could mean for LA.
In love and service,
Paul
Employer Resources
Resource Contact California Homeless Hiring Tax Credit ftb.ca.gov
LA:RISE referrals (888) 4-LARISE / redfworkshop.org
Hospitality Training Academy( 310) 994-5426 / lahta.org
Chrysalis changelives.org
Downtown Women's Center Workforce downtownwomenscenter.org/workforce
Transitional Subsidized Employment (SBWIB) (310) 970-7796
Federal WOTC edd.ca.gov
LA County HRTP Fund opportunity.lacounty.gov/hrtp
Sources
IGH Vanguard Cities Report (2026); CRESCER Association; European Social Network; LA County DEO/LAEDC Immigration Enforcement Economic Impact Report (February 2026); LA Times (December 2025); LA Public Press; NBC Los Angeles; National Restaurant Association; Economic Roundtable; Food for Soul / foodforsoul.it; Hayes Valley Bakeworks / Toolworks; Homeboy Industries; CalMatters.