Strong Foodla Kitchen

Overview

Mission

The mission of l.a. Kitchen is to reclaim healthy, local food that would otherwise go to waste, and use it to empower, nourish, and engage the community. L.a. Kitchen operates three programs to achieve this goal. Empower l.a. Is a 15-week intergenerational culinary job-training program that empowers emancipated foster youth and older adults transitioning out of incarceration to thrive in careers in the food service industry. Impact l.a. Works directly with local farmers and wholesale companies to collect fruits and vegetables that are cosmetically unsalable, recruits thousands of angelinos to transform these raw fruits and vegetables into nutritious meals and snacks and distributes the food products to social service agencies that serve los angeles' low-income and aging populations. In addition, strong food, a social enterprise business, hires graduates of empower l.a. And uses purchased foods to create healthy meals and products for contracts, wholesale and retail sales.

Operating model

Revenue model

Donor-supported. 95% of the money available for current operations came from contributions and gifts.

Distribution model

Direct operator. The filing allocates 100% of reported program-service expenses outside its grant, affiliate-payment, and member-benefit lines. This expense classification does not rule out separately announced grant awards.

• Includes noncash contributions: Reported contributions include donated property or goods.

The verdict

SUPPORTED - A large share of available resources goes toward mission work and the filed numbers largely add up. The required major-donor schedule is missing or incomplete and some filing-based governance responses are negative or unanswered.

Rating breakdown

• Financial Efficiency: 84
• Transparency & Controls: 70
• Accountability: 75
• Sustainability: 22
• Growth: 100

Detailed rating inputs

Details

• Where the money goes: 100% of revenue deployed · 76.4% of spending went to programs
• Governance: 13 of 14 board members independent · 4 of 8 filing controls reported
• Programs: 1 filed program accomplishment · $2.4M in reported program spending
• Leadership: top reported pay $108K · 14 people listed
• Consistency: 31 of 32 current checks pass · 1 finding to review
• Schedules: 5 filed schedules · includes major donors
• Filing history: 5 filing years from 2014 to 2018
• Contacts: How to reach this organization
• Money network: 1 filed money-flow record
• Grant readiness: Federal tax and exclusion status, award history, and grant-maker relationships.
• People: Everyone the filings name, and which of them the filings identify by more than a name.

Key Signals

Signals prioritize questions for review. They are not findings of misconduct.

Grant-readiness screening is separate from the live rating, not a measure of program quality. Review the source records before making a grant decision.

• High — Transparency & Controls: Major donor itemization scored 0/100.
• Review — Accountability: Governance controls: 3 of 7 not reported.
• High — Financial Efficiency: Fundraising efficiency scored 24/100.
• High — Sustainability: Operating margin scored 1/100.
• Moderate — Sustainability: Total-asset coverage ratio scored 43/100.
• Moderate — Transparency & Controls: Schedule A contributions reconciliation did not reconcile in the filed values.
• High — Sustainability: Liabilities to assets ratio scored 11/100.
• High — Grant Readiness: Automatic revocation: this organization had its federal tax-exempt status automatically revoked.