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At just 9 years old, Jacob Bindman got his first food job: volunteering for CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, a San Francisco nonprofit that runs the city’s famed Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. The knives and the fire of the cooking demos drew him in, but it was the connection to the bigger food system and the people who create it that kept him in the food and restaurant world.
Now 23, Bindman is the director of service operations for SF New Deal, a nonprofit he co-founded with his friend and mentor Lenore Estrada in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the city shuttered restaurants last spring, the pair saw an opportunity to support those businesses with cash while providing good food to community members in need. They secured a million-dollar pledge from a tech CEO a friend of Estrada’s who was looking for a way to aid small businesses and quickly got to work, paying restaurants to make meals and forging partnerships with local activis