How a Food Bank Started
Tomás Papo Soñé described how the community around Academia de la Costa helped respond to the 2020 food crisis in Cabarete. The academy’s former space later became a garden, with its old roof material reused in making soil.
“I moved from Santo Domingo to Cabarete to open a jujitsu academy and a martial arts facility,” Papo told me. “Academia de la Costa is the name of the project we run here. Before 2020, everything was always very community oriented. You got to do a certain amount of community work to get your belt promotion.”
Community was baked into the academy from the start. Then 2020 turned that culture into a food bank.
When the lockdown hit
“During 2020, it was a tough time, and the majority of the athletes started reaching me to find ways to help, to create a system to help people,” Papo said. “A big part of the reason why Sostenible exists is because of the athletes that jumped in to help the community.”
The fighters were first in line.
“They were the first people, the jiujitsu practitioners were the first people to join the volunteer lines, to bring food and bring what people needed during 2020. And since that time, we created a system. Nowadays, it’s the whole community that supports this project.”
This is confirmed on Academia de la Costa’s own pages, where the academy lists Cabarete Sostenible among the things it co-founded, and on Cabarete Sostenible’s about page, which credits the academy’s students and athletes with leading the first food packing and distribution.
The roof became the garden
Then came the part I did not expect, the building itself transforming.
“It involved the construction of the academy here, then closing the academy, which was very sad,” Papo said. “But then we opened the community garden. So we turned everything into a garden. We took the whole roof that was made out of cana, and we turned it into soil. We created the community garden that we have now.”
Papo said the old roof was made of cana and that they used it in creating soil for the garden. He was describing the reuse of material and the conversion of the academy’s space, rather than a garden growing on top of an intact roof.
Why the restaurant came next
“The restaurant came two years ago, because we were looking for ways to generate funds to support the organization,” Papo said. “We decided to put hands in action and open the restaurant. We created the menus, the majority of the recipes, together with our team.”
Kitchen funds the food bank. Garden feeds the kitchen. Athletes built it all. The comedor side of that is in the vegetarian comedor serving ancestral dishes without the meat.
The fighters this academy produced
Papo described his role coaching a Dominican fighter who reached the UFC. That was part of his account of the academy’s athletes. The food-bank story rests on the volunteer work he described, rather than an unverified claim that the academy was the first or only one to achieve a sporting milestone.
A community that already had the muscle
A community already had the muscle to feed itself. It just took a crisis to point it at the right target. The discipline, the volunteer culture, the bodies willing to carry boxes, all of it was already in the dojo. When the moment came, fighters became food packers.
When we travel conscious, this is the kind of story you only find by stepping one street back and asking. A jiujitsu academy that became a food bank is not on any tourist map. It takes very little time to notice it and to back the people who built it.
How to help Cabarete Sostenible
Cabarete Sostenible is at Calle Principal, Callejón de la Loma (Colonia Nueva), Cabarete, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Email contact@cabaretesostenible.org, or find them on Instagram at @cabarete.sostenible. You can donate to the food bank here. Since April 2020 they have distributed over 4,000 food packages.