The Kain Na Food Hub

“KAIN NA!” [kah-een nah] means “Let’s Eat!” in Tagalog, a Native Language of the Philippines. It is a phrase you’ll often hear when visiting a Filipino household, which represents a willingness to make you feel welcome and share a lovingly and carefully prepared meal together.

The Kain Na food hub is managed and operated by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), a San Francisco non-profit providing affordable homes, social services, and resources. Located on the ground-floor of a TNDC affordable housing building, 626 Mission Bay Boulevard. Kain Na offers an open market with free, nutritious, and culturally-relevant food, as well as family-friendly education and hands-on workshops around health, nutrition, and cooking. There they cultivate a community-building space where people, with their diversity of cultures, recipes, identities and experiences, can feel celebrated and at home, and the traditions of people of color and Indigenous communities are honored.

San Francisco, CA

Art Integration:
Community Engagement
Art Curation
Production Management

Building 180 was contacted by TNDC to help find an artist that could thoughtfully execute their vision while also embodying their mission. As a member of the Filipino community in the Bay Area and someone who benefited from free school lunch and food bank resources, ChiChai felt especially connected to the project. Building 180 facilitated the design process and also managed the production of the mural.

Before designing the “Sharing the Harvest'' mural, ChiChai participated in focus groups conducted by TNDC where tenants were invited to share their visions for the new Food Hub. These visions informed ChiChai’s design, which is representative of the pre-colonial Tagalog Goddess Lakapati – the goddess of harvest – both peaking through and embodying one of San Francisco’s hills. She is adorned with a full moon and rice leaves, illustrating the indigenous prayer for a bountiful harvest. Beaming out of her hands are black oak acorns – an Ohlone delicacy – while other fruits and flowers grow from the hills. Woven in the landscape are community members blooming with different fresh foods from each of their cultures.

Kain Na offers food in partnership with the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and Deep Medicine Circle, which is a women-of-color-led and worker-directed nonprofit organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration, storytelling, and learning. Kain Na also marks an important use of the San Francisco Soda Tax, which uses its annual income to disrupt health inequities by increasing access to fresh and locally grown produce through affordable and healthy retail, nutritious school meals, nutritional education, oral health, water accessibility, and more.

Black and Brown communities and communities with low incomes are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity. Lack of access to affordable and nutritious food is inextricably linked to higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses. ¼ of SF residents are at risk of food insecurity; within Mission Bay alone, 28% of residents fall into the moderate-to-low-to-extremely-low-income levels. “As one of San Francisco’s newest neighborhoods, Mission Bay has limited affordable grocery options for residents,” said Supervisor Matt Haney. “This places a large and disproportionate burden on our neighbors with low incomes. Kain Na is a critical step toward building food security in the community.”

Learn more about TNDC’s work at www.tndc.org, and check out ChiChai’s work at https://www.chi-chai.co/. 

To learn more about food insecurity in SF, check out the latest public health report. 

If you’d like to support local organizations that are directly supporting the resilience of communities who are disproportionately impacted by food and climate injustice, please consider getting involved or donating to:
Mycelium Youth Network 
Deep Medicine Circle 
Marin Food Bank 
Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation