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Photo credit: Buck Ennis. Barbara Hughes leads City Beet Kitchens, a pioneering social purpose catering company, and helped start the groundbreaking AIDS policy organization Treatment Action Group.
Gotham Gigs: Activist chef turned nonprofit exec changes lives through meals
- April 16, 2025
- •Jobs
In the late 1980s, during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Barbara Hughes was working as a chef in a Lower Manhattan restaurant and struggling to contain her anger over the many friends she was losing to the disease. Her life changed one shift when a cook invited her to a meeting of the activist group ACT UP.
