‘When you’re able to get to the stomach of the people, you can get to the minds of the people.’

“I had the set goal that I wanted to make changes in my community. I didn’t like the papers all over the place and the grass yay high tall. How can I help to make a difference? That’s the strength that’s making everything move,” Mackenzie says. “We’re creating businesses to create jobs and options for people in the neighborhood and beyond the neighborhood, you know? The only thing that you can really leave behind is your reputation, so we want to have the reputation that we actually tried to make changes.”You have so many other irons in the fire. What led you to open a restaurant, too? Mackenzie: We both started eating a vegetarian diet at very young ages, so in our teens. I started when I was 17 or 19. And I’ve always been inspired to do things for the community. How does what you build help yourself, but also help the community? Not necessarily to become some rich icon or whatever, like that. Some people go into business just for business, just to make money, but it’s a holistic endeavor.Eighteen years ago, I started a vegetarian restaurant in Codman Square, not too far from the restaurant now, across from the Dorchester courthouse. The reason for developing that was basically we needed the options in our community, you know? Cutting across town just to get a heathy sandwich, or a healthy meal after doing so much work, we just didn’t have that in our community — and we needed to develop businesses with that option in our community. We also had the inspiration and the foresight to see that this was a direction we needed to go because most of the food that we were already consuming was not healthy or nutritious for us.Now, fast-forward into 2020. Everyone is health-conscious, and we get the second opportunity to now open a restaurant in our community in a place that had a representation that was negative. The amount of stories we’ve heard about Four Corners! And for us to transform it where it now has a positive effect, that’s exactly what we were aiming for. … It’s not just racial. It’s a quality of living. People are crying out. We’re not getting that quality of living, and that’s what we want to develop in our communities. … When you’re able to get to the stomach of the people, you can get to the minds of the people.How has COVID-19 affected business?Mackenzie: Hopefully, we’ll be opening some more days. But we also took the opportunity and the ability to take a rest, reposition ourselves, you know? I think everyone has done that. But it has affected us in the sense of getting people to do pick-ups and call-ins, you know? We have cut our hours. That’s what has happened.Ra Kiros: We definitely had to downsize with employees. We definitely had to rearrange how much food we even make for the community. So we defini
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