50 Best Restaurants announces its 2023 Champions of Change – hospitality heroes who are making meaningful change for their communities and creating role models for a better industry.
Nora Fitzgerald Belahcen, the winner of the Champions of Change award, runs Amal in Marrakech, Morocco, a social enterprise that helps empower disadvantaged women.
She opened the first Amal Center in 2013 to train struggling Arab women – often single mothers rejected by society – in culinary art and its associated skills.
The center now runs a successful restaurant and catering business, staffed by trainers and students, with 30 graduates every eight months.
Amal’s latest project is the Sign Language Café in Marrakech, which employs deaf women and serves as a model for businesses run by deaf people.
The second 2023 Champions of Change award goes to Los Angeles- based duo Othón Nolasco and Damián Diaz, who created a nonprofit food security project, No Us Without You LA, during the pandemic.
It provides support in the form of food assistance and counseling to undocumented immigrant families working in the area, who are not legally recognized as US citizens and therefore cannot qualify for government assistance.
50 Best will make a financial donation to the causes of the winners, allowing them to continue their initiatives.
These accolades are part of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023 event, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, which will conclude with a ceremony on June 20 in Valencia, Spain.