Brooklyn Peace Center

Peace Cafe is a social enterprise of Brooklyn Peace Center (501c3), an asset-based community organization that serves as a catalyst for peacebuilding and conflict transformation. The aim of Peace Café is to build community, provide employment opportunities in the neighborhood, and create an earned revenue stream to support the operational and programmatic costs of Brooklyn Peace Center.

Brooklyn Peace Center engages and equips community residents, activists and artists, clergy and clinicians, through peacebuilding activities, arts and culture events, webinars and in-person workshops and seminars. We’ve hosted film screenings, art shows with local artists, trauma/resilience workshops, and recently we’ve launched a monthly artist-in-residence program and art market with local vendors.

Peace Café is located on the ground floor of Brooklyn Peace Center, which was originally built in 1891 as a synagogue called Beth Shalom (House of Peace). The building was purchased by Mennonites (part of the historic peace church) in 1962 and housed the First Mennonite Church of Brooklyn until it was disbanded in 2019. Rather than selling the building to developers, the Mennonites accepted the vision presented by Jason and Vonetta Storbakken, long-time Brooklyn residents who live less than a mile from the building, to build a peace center.

Jason serves as pastor at Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship. And Vonetta is founder of Radical Living, a youth-centered intergenerational environmental justice summer program. While there is close alignment with the Mennonites, BPC is not a religious organization. It is a community center rooted in a peacebuilding that is antiracist, abolitionist and liberationist, and 100% LGBTQIA affirming. All are welcome at BPC.

The Peace Café will serve as a community hub and provide local employment. It will also help BPC to be a sustainable organization that is not beholden to grantmakers or donors (although such gifts are always welcomed and appreciated).

The café is so close to opening. We have most of the equipment, such as a three-group (twenty-year old, but excellent condition) La Marzocco espresso machine that Vonetta and Jason drove a thousand miles to purchase. This project has been in the works for a while. And we need your support to fully open.

This immediate $5k goal will help us purchase the last few remaining essential items/equipment needed to have a soft launch over the coming weeks. It will also help us to cover wages for staff as we build up our revenue and build our community base.

Thank you for being a part of the vision to build peace in Brooklyn and beyond!