Public kitchens are spaces where people can come together to cook, eat, gather, and learn. People engage in difficult conversations around food justice and share joyful moments, like creating a dish passed down from your grandmother and sharing it with people you may have just met, while talking about the ingredients and the process.
– Mark
Mark Araujo is a designer, artist, educator, and community engagement specialist with a strong background in civic design, food justice, and environmentalism. He is passionate about helping others through the power of intentional and impact-oriented design. Mark is currently the Community Engagement Manager with the Boston Food Forest Coalition where he supports neighbors in organizing, designing, and building public edible parks across Boston. Mark is also the co-founder of EquiTable, which is a food justice non-profit dedicated to advancing equity across the food system through public kitchens. Mark has always loved the way that food can bring people together and build connections across recipes, cultures, languages, and backgrounds. He encourages those around him to think critically about our food systems and to ask why some people don’t have access and how we can grow something new.
With MISI, Mark began a multimedia project to represent the holistic sensory experience of spending time in public kitchens as a way of communicating to the greater public the beauty of those spaces and of what food makes possible.