In the Baghdad Bowl, Nieda Abbas channels the flavors of her first home country with curried chicken, rice, peas, carrots and almonds sliced whisper thin. In the Sakarya Bowl, she adds roasted beef meatballs, a fragrant tomato sauce, and a lemony, green tabbouleh from her years as a refugee in Turkey.

Camila Guiza-Chavez, an organizer with the Sisters in Diaspora Collective and a co-director of the local immigrant and refugee job training program Havenly, offered her proposal.

“Our proposal is to spend $62.5 million of American Rescue Plan funding on making a meaningful, serious effort to confront the housing crisis that we have in New Haven,” she said.

[Nieda] oversees job training in the kitchen and teaches fellow refugee and immigrant women how to cook. [...] When asked about the connection between cooking and advocacy, Abbas paused and said, “they say in my country: don’t sleep if your neighbor is hungry.”

"Havenly’s mission looks beyond the traditional model of refugee resettlement, offering refugee women a six-month paid fellowship. Cohorts of women work at the community café on Temple Street while attending classes ranging from finance to English to civic education."

Fifty people gathered on the front steps of City Hall to call for New Haven to allocate a majority of the $115 million it received in federal Covid relief funding toward affordable housing.

The rally was organized by the Sisters In Diaspora Collective, a recently-formed group of immigrant and refugee women activists affiliated with the local restaurant and job training center Havenly Treats.

"But Ms. Abbas, 44, is working to help. Every morning, she cooks for Havenly [Treats] a nonprofit organization that helps refugee chefs sell food. Drawing from her work as a baker in Iraq, she cooks about 200 meals for people in need. She makes fatayer with cheese and za’atar, elegant cucumber salads with spices, and homemade sauce."