World Central Kitchen Has Failed Crisis Zones: Led by a Cook, Did I Want to Leave? José Andrés Can’t Leave, and Why I Need Your Organization
WCK said the seven workers killed in the Israeli strike included a Palestinian and citizens of Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom and Canada — with one a dual citizen of the U.S.
It acknowledged it could have invested more in its internal operations to discover “bad actors,” and said it was making changes among personnel and partners in both Ukraine and Turkey as a result — as well as implementing additional safeguards to combat fraud, like an anonymous tip line.
While WCK gets perfect scores on watchdog sites like Charity Navigator and Charity Watch, there have been some concerns and criticisms raised recently about where exactly that money is going — including from within the organization itself.
“As a cook, as a chef, when I founded this organization, I never expected that this will happen,” he said. I wanted to remove World Central Kitchen from Ukraine immediately. The locals told me that José couldn’t leave. We need you. We need your organization.’”
In December, Bloomberg published a story alleging — among other accusations — that Andrés looked the other way on matters of staff safety, including demanding that staff send a food truck into parts of Turkey that local officials had declared “no-gos” due to landslides.
He said that maybe people do not feel safe in these types of situations, so they should not be there. I wouldn’t be able to tell someone to do what I’m not willing to do on my own, because José Andrés puts people in danger.
Among them are two people, one of whom was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Several Democratic politicians nominated WCK and his brother for the Peace Prize this year.
Source: World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years
World Central Kitchen: Volunteers, Disaster Response, Government Needs, and the Landfall of a Food Pantry after a Worldquake
The nonprofit has grown fast since its founding. It brought in more than 500 million dollars in contributions and grants in the year 2022, which was four times what it brought in the previous year.
It said in June that a 60-year-old volunteer named Igor was killed when Russian shelling hit his apartment building in Kharkiv, and that two other volunteers, Sardor and Viktoria, had been killed in a strike in Chuhuiv the previous July. (The group only identified them by their first names.)
It delivered food to a Buffalo, NY, neighborhood after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket, and distributed food after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas.
It gave food to survivors of major wildfires in California and Hawaii, and federal workers in D.C. during the government shutdown as well as providing food to stranded cruise ship passengers in the early days of the COVID-19pandemic.
The organization has grown substantially over the years and expanded its efforts to focus not only on disaster response but resilience training and longer-term community needs, including opening a culinary school in Port-au-Prince several years after the earthquake that started it.
“We are very good at figuring out what is wrong and adjusting to that,” he said. “And so a problem becomes an opportunity … We’re practical. We’re efficient. And we can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.”
He told NPR that he expected to see more chefs get involved in disaster response since they’re well suited to managing chaos.
It provided over 20,000 meals in the Houston area after Hurricane Harvey, and another 3.6 million in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, for which it was named a James Beard humanitarian of the year.
After the earthquake in Haiti, he traveled to the country to cook for the people in camps, setting in motion World Central Kitchen.
The aid group World Central Kitchen said Tuesday that it is pausing its efforts to feed Palestinians in Gaza after seven of its workers were killed by an Israeli strike.
The charity said that the team was hit while leaving a warehouse where they had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza by sea, a route World Central Kitchen helped establish last month.
An investigation will be conducted at the highest levels after the organization said the convoy had been traveling in a deconflicted zone and in armored cars with their logo on them. Erin Gore, the CEO of World Central Kitchen, called it a “targeted attack.”
“This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war,” she said.
The U.S.-based organization, which was founded by celebrity chef José Andrés and his wife Patricia in 2010, delivers food to people on the front lines of natural and humanitarian disasters around the world.
It has been doing work in the region, since the terrorist attack on Israel in October. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Last week, it was said that it would keep pushing to get food into Gaza until there was more aid coming in via land. Now those plans are up in the air — it says it will be “making decisions about the future of our work soon.”
“More and more people, particularly children, are dying of starvation,” Gore and Andrés said in a joint statement. “We’ve known for months that famine is imminent and the situation is getting worse.”
The Gaza Strip has been in crisis since Israel blockaded the territory six months ago, with the northern part of it facing imminent famine. Israeli officials have denied restricting aid and called reports of a looming famine “a complete lie.”
The second shipment of shelf-stable items, stocked with dates in honor of Islam’s holiest time of the year, left Cyprus on Saturday. The Cypriot foreign ministry said Tuesday that some 100 tons of aid had been unloaded in Gaza before WCK announced it was pausing its operations in the enclave, and the remaining 240 tons would be returned to Cyprus, according to the Associated Press.
In a Reuters interview Wednesday, humanitarian chef Andrés said “The U.S. must do more to tell Prime Minister Netanyahu this war needs to end now.” He believed that the aid workers had been targeted by Israeli forces.
The United States and foreign leaders, as well as international organizations are offering their sympathies and condemning the Israeli military strike.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — which has lost at least 176 employees in Gaza — said the organization provides “much needed food assistance to a starving population.”
Family and friends of Kirby, the Palestinian worker Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, 25, who worked with World Central Kitchen in Gaza
In a statement issued by the U.K. government, the family of James Kirby said that they were “incredibly proud” of his work, which included tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and that he would be remembered as a hero.
But some family members have told British media Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response — “There was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip. They didn’t like that this happens in war.
They are there to help and feed the people. Making them a target is unacceptable. Adam McLaughlin, Kirby’s cousin, says that the family’s response wasn’t nice.
The Palestinian worker who was killed, Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, 25, was from the city of Rafah, in the southern part of Gaza. He had worked for World Central Kitchen as a driver and translator since the beginning of the year, the AP reported.
Polish citizen Damian Sobol, 35, was identified by a local government leader in his hometown of Przemysl on social media, saying, “There are no words to describe the feelings of people who knew this amazing young man right now… Let him rest in peace.
Polish President Andrzej Duda also praised the killed workers. These brave people changed the world for the better with their service and dedication. This tragedy should not have happened, and must be explained, he wrote.
The man who died was a dual citizen of the US and Canada. He had served as an infantryman in the Canadian armed forces before working in Mexico with World Central Kitchen.
Three of the British people who died were former military personnel who were using that experience in conflict zones to help safeguard the work of the charity’s staff.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to Frankcom on Tuesday. Australia expects full accountability for the deaths of aid workers.”
A memorial to Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, a relief worker in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic
I have no words. but I promise you, your spirit will always be with us,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. He went so far as to say he wished he hadn’t started the charity because she would still be alive today.
Frankcom had coordinated meals for Ukrainian refugees when she was with NPR. She worked in finance and banking for nearly a decade before getting involved with the organization. World Central Kitchen arrived to provide emergency aid to communities following a deadly volcanic eruption in the country. I said, “Okay great, can you make a sandwich?” She recalled saying something to them. I can make a sandwich. ‘Right, come on, we’re going to make 3,000 of them.’ “
She had helped people during brush fires in her native Australia, and supported the Navajo Nation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Australian aid worker Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43, a relief lead for World Central Kitchen, died “doing the work she loves,” her family said in a statement to media.
They were part of the group of humanitarian workers who were killed in the Palestinian territories since October.
On Wednesday, the bodies of the six foreigners were sent out of Gaza into Egypt on their way to their home countries, The Associated Press reported. The Palestinian’s remains were handed over to his family to be buried in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack on the aid workers was unintentional. And in a message Tuesday, the Israeli military offered condolences to World Central Kitchen and praised the group for bringing humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, as well as Israel after the Oct. 7 attack, saying it would make public the findings of its investigation into the case.