Baba’s Vegan Cafe feeds Oasis House Community Workers

Good work continues by: Yogi Lauren Wolley 

Before I teamed up with Chef Wo’se Kofi, I was a case worker at SCHARP Oasis House, located on the corner of 52nd st and Vermont in historic South Central LA. Oasis House has been around since the 90’s and it is like a well known underground safehouse for those of us dealing with life’s roughest conditions.

Oasis House is a community based mental health center offering an array of social services including, case management, mental health services, workshops, meals, clothing, and resources for navigating social/government funded systems. Oasis House has a diverse staff of 30 and serves up to 150 lives a day.This micro village in mental health is a gem and their staff exceeds its abilities in working with vulnerable populations. Unfortunately, the area around Oasis House, has nothing but fast food restaurants, liquor stores and the El Super Grocery store, but luckily we at Baba’s Vegan Cafe are ready to level out this injustice by offering our organic plant based cuisine.

The Weekly Salad Lunch service, usually includes patties, salads, and or chilli, but is based around our delicious gourmet salads, with over 6 different toppings and homemade Apple Cider Vinegar Honey dressing. We  make our salads affordable and loaded with vitamins and nutrients.  

(323) Vegan 93
​Babasvegancafe.com

Why Serving Social Services offices are important?

Oasis House community workers and all those in the social service field, serve as role models for the community on how to enhance our lives rather through health, housing, choices we make or resources we can tap into. These community workers, along with our community members need to have access to healthy food, so they in turn can be healthy and impactful to those they work with. Many community workers spend time: emotional, spiritual, physical and mental energy tapping into solutions for solving problems and crisis. Sometimes(most of the time) it creates additional stress, and workers become tired from the emotional/mental heaviness of working in social services. Now you add stress to a fast food based diet, and your immune system is compromised, and you end up doing more harm than good, while trying to do good for others. This is a “sick” cycle, that actually keeps our community workers just as sick as our vulnerable populations.

Hence, the importance of continually bringing awareness to healthy food deserts in urban communities, offering healthy food to both workers and members of the community and lastly adopting a plant based diet that supports optimum wellness.
Coming Full Circle

My Oasis house stay was a 5 year residency, working with a multitude of clients, on finding solutions to everyday barriers, programming of community events for members and staff, healthy living workshops covering meditation, exercise, diet, holistic nutrition, positive esteem, communication skills and yoga.

Ultimately, it was Oasis house where I learned the realities of the social service system and manifested a new identity in my relationship to social services and how to execute my goal of creating access to holistic services through food, yoga,herbal healing, meditation and resources for the global village.

Being able to serve Oasis House as a vegan culinary artivist, rather a case worker but still maintaining the alignment of serving good to others allows me to see how everything comes full circle. The weekly salad lunch service has assisted us in boosting sales, and expanding the business to reach other community workers and organizations, plus, being able to still stay connected to familiar faces. With everything in alignment, we give thanks to the Oasis House Village, for all the work they do, and for supporting local small justice based business, like ourselves. Ashe!