With bold, full color photos, emotional, complex essays, and simple but communicative illustration, the newly published Nourish has ambitious aspirations. Co-founder Alyssa Kearns hesitates to call it a cookbook, because while it began as one and recipes dot its 122 pages, the stories told within aim to do far more than teach the reader how to prepare certain dishes. Using food narratives to highlight Seattle’s community organizers, the paperback tome — per its introduction — hopes to “ignite a fire in your heart and on your stove.”

Kearns and her four co-founders saw Seattle’s Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements in the national spotlight over the last year and wanted to feature the people behind the scenes, the ones often left unnamed. Each of the ten chapters of the book is from the perspective of a different organizer, kicking off with a story by another co-founder, Nica Sy.

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University of Washington (UW) students Josh Williams, Cassidy McGee, Alyssa Kearns, Sandra Li, and Dionica Sy were placed in a project group for their two-quarter Foster School of Business course called “Creating a Company Class,” which began last September. After witnessing a 2020 packed with various social movements sustained by community organizations, they chose to create a book called Nourish, a collection of short stories, photos, and recipes from 10 local Seattle organizers.

“Food is integral to our liberation,” Sy said in a video preview published on Nourish’s Instagram feed last week.

Nourish is a collection of short stories, photos and recipes submitted by 10 organizers within the Seattle community. These stories are compiled into a visually appealing coffee table book, highlighting the stories of these organizers through family recipes and food.

The team behind Nourish is made up of five seniors at the University of Washington, united by their appreciation for sharing food and dedication to social justice. The five entrepreneurship students are launching the Nourish project with the support of a course offered at the Foster School of Business called Creating a Company. This course tasks students to create and run a company between Autumn and Winter Quarters. A number of successful, local businesses have been launched through Creating a Company, including Sugar + Spoon and Joe Chocolate Co.

“Nourish” is a cookbook with a collection of recipes and various media from 10 organizers in the Seattle community. Created by a team of five UW students, “Nourish” aims to document and uplift the stories of Seattle organizers through food. According to CEO Dionica Sy, the idea for “Nourish” was developed as a project for the popular Foster School of Business entrepreneurship course “Create a Company.” “The five people on our team were kind of brought together through this class, but ultimately, through a passion for social justice and also a love of sharing food,” Sy said. “We had those ties between us that inspired the creation of something that had to do with justice and food.”