community spotlight
Feeds the Heart as Well as the Stomach by Ana Haugseon and Jennifer Iamele Savage
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estiny Community Café is a nonprofit, pay-what-you-can community café that provides highquality and delicious meals produced from local sources when available, served in a restaurant where everybody eats, regardless of means. It may be hard to believe, but there are no prices on the menu; customers donate what they can to pay for their meal. Patrons can volunteer to earn their meal, pay the suggested price ($10) or less, or they can pay it forward for a future patron’s meal. Everyone is welcome to give their time, as well as money. Destiny Community Café is a proud member of the nonprofit One World Everybody Eats (OWEE) movement that includes more than 30 Community Cafés 14
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around the country and persists through the efforts of numerous individuals, businesses and communities dedicated to increasing food security and building community through its pay-what-you-can restaurant model. It supports more than 60 existing and dozens of start-up Cafés in its network with expert consultation, best practices and networking opportunities. Founded by the Scott family, who has been all about feeding the neighborhood for as long as RaGina Scott Saunders can recall, Destiny Community Café aims to continue to reach the community’s heart through their stomach. Saunders recalls, “I remember Grandma always had a pot of something on the stove
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and anyone who was hungry could come and eat,” she says. Saunders, the owner of North Charleston’s Scott’s Grand Banquet and Reception Center and founder of the Soul Food Alliance, has carried on the family tradition in a big way. In 2015, she discovered the One World Everybody Eats program and immediately saw a way to extend her mission. She opened Destiny Community Café, the only pay-what-youcan café in South Carolina, in April 2015. The Community Café movement began in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2003, when Denise Cerreta, the owner of the One World Cafe, decided to change her business model. Instead of charging a set amount for a set portion, she started inviting her customers to pay what they could and what they thought the meal was worth. Cerreta eventually started OWEE and dedicated herself full-time to spreading the community cafe movement across the country. Destiny Community Outreach runs the Café, and their mission is to make sure that everyone in the community, regardless of circumstances, has an opportunity to eat a hot, nutritious meal in a comfortable,