Love & Lunch on Skid Row | LaRayia Gaston
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2019
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Moving from New York to Los Angeles, LaRayia Gaston (https://www.linkedin.com/in/larayia/) was struck by the extreme poverty she saw in a part of the city known as skid row, and how close it was to extreme wealth. Raised to always lead with love and be of service, she could not turn away. While simultaneously launching and building her own design and branding agency, she founded Lunch On Me (LOM) (https://www.lunchonme.org/). The organization now redistributes organic food that would otherwise be discarded to people living on skid row six days a week, reaching 10,000 people a month.
The story of this community, along with Gaston's time both helping, then living on skid row for 43 days, is the subject of a forthcoming documentary called 43 Days. You can learn more and help contribute to its production here (https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/43days).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So my guest today, LaRéa Gaston, grew up kind of between New York City, Philadelphia, |
| 0:11.7 | Maryland, and eventually Tucson, where she went to high school. |
| 0:15.9 | And after leaving, she found herself drawn to LA, not entirely sure why she wanted to |
| 0:20.2 | be there. |
| 0:21.2 | But once she was there, soon after, she also found herself in a part of LA, known as Skid Row. |
| 0:26.1 | Skid Row is almost like a small, toots pretty substantial, ten city, where there's a very |
| 0:31.8 | large homeless community that has been there for generations. |
| 0:35.8 | It's something that a lot of people have thought about, tried to work on, tried to solve, |
| 0:40.7 | and yet it remains. |
| 0:42.0 | And when she went there, something happened. |
| 0:45.0 | It's sort of a part of her from the time she was a small child, was always told that |
| 0:51.2 | you've got to leave with love and do your part always. |
| 0:55.6 | And immediately she found herself in a place of being shocked, but also wanting to |
| 1:01.7 | be of service, wanting to help out in some way, shape or form that started by helping |
| 1:07.0 | provide food, but also by helping provide love, by seeing people wanting to get to know |
| 1:12.0 | them as human beings. |
| 1:13.4 | A period of years that has since grown into an organization called Lunch On Me, where |
| 1:19.8 | they feed now 10,000 people on Skid Row every month and host monthly parties, where it's |
| 1:27.2 | not just about food, but it is about acknowledging everybody's humanity, being of service in |
| 1:32.6 | a number of different ways and bringing two different parts of the LA community together |
| 1:38.1 | to awaken each other. |
| 1:39.9 | This story, how she moved into it, how she built something from nothing, and also how |
... |
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