For an entrepreneur whose business was on the cusp of a breakthrough, Nathalie Lecorps felt closer to having a breakdown.
It was December 2023, and the owner of Gourmet Kreyol was having the busiest months of her career. Her food truck and catering business had won a $1 million contract to feed Haitian refugees. She’d already hired 32 workers — including some migrants themselves — to roast pork and fry plantains out of CommonWealth Kitchen, the acclaimed food incubator in Dorchester where Lecorps was then based.
Yet Lecorps was so despondent she often sat in her car in CommonWealth Kitchen’s parking lot, trying to will herself to walk through its doors.
Instead of feeling like one of CommonWealth Kitchen’s success stories, Lecorps felt undermined at every turn. CWK had promised business support and training, but she hadn’t received any coaching in years. Now, it seemed the kitchen was trying to poach one of her employees and she was being forced to compete against the nonprofit for a lucrative contract. The incubator was celebrated for its mission to empower minority small business owners, but from where Lecorps sat, the reality was something else entirely.
“If they really stuck to their mission, CommonWealth Kitchen would be an amazing place,” Lecorps said. “People who are donating millions of dollars a year really don’t know what’s going on in there.”
CommonWealth Kitchen today feels like a house divided.
There is a bloc of entrepreneurs happy to sing its praises, while others — current and former business members, as well as former employees — describe a worthy organization riven by mismanagement, infighting, and constant tension. Businesses are leaving in frustration, dozens of employees have quit or were fired, and leadership has been a revolving door since nearly the entire board quit four years ago in a power struggle with longtime executive director Jen Faigel.
Indeed, many of the complaints center around Faigel and her hard-charging style.
Faigel came from the real estate world and has spent a decade building CWK into a fund-raising and publicity powerhouse. She says its mission of empowering, supporting, and connecting small businesses is her North Star. Yet she acknowledges CWK can, in some ways, feel like a “cult of personality.”
She says the nonprofit has struggled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the abrupt departure of several staff members last year — which coincided with the sudden death of her father — has unsettled some members. It was, she said, a “down period.”
”I’m the first to admit that,” she said. “We have grown in an absurd way, in an intense way. And as a nonprofit, to have that kind of growth is very hard to sustain in the best of circumstances. And we are not in the best of circumstances.”
What became CommonWealth Kitchen opened as CropCircle Kitchen in 2009 out of a redeveloped brewery in Jamaica Plain. When CropCircle’s leadership team departed in 2014, Faigel, who had overseen the brewery project for the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation, stepped in as interim director and has led it since.
Faigel reshaped CropCircle’s shared kitchen concept into a mission-driven organization that created opportunities for minority, women, and immigrant food entrepreneurs. It was a mission that resonated, as did Faigel’s valiant efforts to help her members weather the pandemic.
CWK has been showered with praise and money, winning millions in grants from the likes of the Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation, and charitable arms of financial institutions. In 2022, CWK bought and renovated its building — a former hot dog factory in Grove Hall — for $11 million, $8 million of which came from state and city loans and grants.
CWK charges its members rent for kitchen and storage space and use of its manufacturing facilities. CWK also has in-house staff who make its own products — falafel, sauces — that it sells to local universities and hospitals, relationships that are designed to benefit its small-business members down the line.
Over the last decade, CWK’s annual revenue has grown ten-fold, to $6.6 million in 2024, most of which came from grants and donations. And its portfolio today is expansive: CWK entrepreneurs serve food to MIT students and in Boston Public Schools and pitch products to Sodexo and Whole Foods. Its alumni own local cafes and sell products nationally in stores.
Faigel has a big vision. She talks about the organization as a way to disrupt the “procuriarchy” of commercial food, giving historically underestimated entrepreneurs a chance to break in. But that work, she said, has gotten more challenging for CWK and its members alike.
“Pre-COVID, you could make a living as a food truck being downtown. You can’t do it anymore. You could make a living at a farmers’ market. You can’t do that anymore,” she said. “Our work has gotten enormously harder and enormously more complicated.”
Many nonprofits have challenges, particularly when earnest ideals clash with financial realities. CWK is no exception. Its 40-plus business owners share space but compete for valuable contracts. And food businesses in particular right now face rising costs and a pullback in consumer spending that makes already modest margins even tighter.
But many business owners such as Lecorps became so disillusioned they elected to leave. These entrepreneurs, as well as some current and former workers, describe a persistent plague of microaggressions, undercutting the very values the nonprofit seemed to stand for. And while entrepreneurs hustled to build their businesses, they were also expected to sell a story about the broader enterprise and pose for pictures with oversized checks. And some say that part had increasingly come to feel more exploitive than congratulatory.
Moreover, the political culture feels like it’s turned against them.
Five years after COVID and George Floyd, the corporate, philanthropic, and government support for Black- and brown-owned businesses that fueled CWK’s rise is fading. The very notion of DEI feels under attack, and many people worry that speaking out about CWK’s problems could undermine a mission they treasure.
But this moment is also why many feel CWK simply needs to do better.
Lecorps is far from alone in viewing her time at CWK as “stuck in misery.”
In October of 2024, Felipe Ramirez, who runs Lalu’s Chicken out of CWK, sent a companywide email questioning CWK’s promise to be an “equitable incubator.” Why, he asked, did he only learn of city and state minority-vendor programs from someone outside the organization? In 18 months at the kitchen, he saw constant staff turnover and several rounds of confusing corporate reorganizations. Billing for kitchen time was a mess, and at least 20 businesses had left, he said, all citing Faigel’s leadership as the cause.
CommonWealth Kitchen, he wrote, “has failed to be a place that nourishes ‘young’ businesses to prepare them for scaling to be sustainable and viable. ... How long do you think we will have to wait for the kind of support you so proudly brag about?”
Frustrations were mounting throughout the building.
Linh Vu was among a cohort of entrepreneurs who arrived in June 2024 and hoped to develop a business plan for her baked energy bites, L’s Goodies Snacks. Two months in, CWK’s small business coaches abruptly left and were not replaced. She kept paying her monthly fees, but says she never heard from Faigel.
Eventually, she and most of her cohort members pushed to get their $700 deposits back. Vu quit the program and moved to Food Revolution, an incubator in Stoneham. Nearly her entire class of startups moved on.
“I wasn’t happy with the experience,” Vu said. “I felt like that experience delayed my progress.”
For Lecorps, pride in her accomplishments was marred by internal conflicts. She said Gourmet Kreyol was routinely overcharged for rented kitchen time — no small sum at $16,000 a month. And in 2023, after securing the migrant contracts herself, Lecorps learned CWK had bid against her for the work.
CommonWealth Kitchen shouldn’t be competing against its own members, she remembers thinking. Hadn’t it promised to support her?
Lecorps knew her migrant work made for a good news story, and she participated in some media coverage about her efforts. But over time, she kept getting congratulatory text messages for being in news stories from outlets she hadn’t talked to. Without her knowledge, Lecorps said, CWK had been pitching her success story while simultaneously trying to underbid her for the business.
It got to the point that in October 2024, Lecorps hired an attorney and sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding CWK stop using Gourmet Kreyol’s name in press reports. That, she said, prompted increased hostility from Faigel.
(In response, Faigel said Lecorps had signed a standard photo release as part of her contract with CWK and received “substantial benefits” during her time there, including discounted rent. Kitchen charges had risen because the volume of meals had soared. As for going after the same contracts, Faigel said, CWK was simply responding to a need.
“We weren’t trying to compete with her,” Faigel said. “We just saw opportunity for our folks.”)
Regardless, things got so bad Lecorps thought about quitting the business entirely. But she’d been saving up, and then won a $200,000 storefront grant from the city of Boston. In December 2024, she left CWK to run her own restaurant in Mattapan that opened this May.
“I was in a dark place for a long time,” she said. “CommonWealth Kitchen is the place where dreams go to die.”
These concerns crystallized in an anonymous organization-wide email that arrived on May 1. May Day is typically associated with workers’ rights. But the email, addressed to Faigel, was clearly a call for help and enumerated the many ways the writer felt CWK’s mission had shifted. Faigel had failed to create a diverse leadership team that reflected the community it intended to serve, the author wrote. And the small-business members were feeling stuck.
“The people you built CWK for are being tokenized, under-supported, and quietly pushed to the margins while the organization profits off their stories,” read the email from the person, who used the moniker, ”The People of CommonWealth." “They’re turned into poster children for progress, paraded like trophies of impact, while behind the scenes, many of them are unsupported, underdeveloped, or worse discarded.”
Faigel responded in an email by pledging to take the accusations “extremely seriously,” but also calling on its anonymous author to come forward.
So far, no one has. And some entrepreneurs at CWK push back on the email’s message.
“From day one, we found a supportive environment — never once did we experience discrimination or hardship," Tarun Bhalla, whose sauce company Meal Mantra has been at CWK for eight years, wrote in an email to the Globe. “CWK gave us the tools, space, and encouragement to turn our dream into reality.”
But with others, the message clearly resonated. In the weeks since, more than two dozen people with ties to CWK have told the Globe they believe the heralded organization has lost its way.
Even if the email was anonymous and aggressive, it held “undertones of truth,” said Kamaal Jarrett, who launched his Caribbean sauce business, Hillside Harvest, out of CWK and has been operating independently for about two years. He watched its values change.
“The place that I left,” Jarrett said, “was not the same place that I joined.”
The root of CWK’s troubles, according to those who spoke to the Globe, lies with high staff turnover caused in part by ever-shifting agendas. They say Faigel often asks staff to pivot midstream to respond to new opportunities or grants. That could mean quickly shifting from organizing holiday gift boxes to mapping out a new university partnership to overseeing falafel production for a local hospital.
But more than a dozen former employees say they felt under-supported, undermined, and often overwhelmed. While the organization’s mission is to uplift people of color, many female and minority employees say they learned they were being paid less than white counterparts, after a salary list was circulated among the staff.
Faigel admits the organization’s priorities frequently pivot but says that’s the nature of the work, and she measures success by the impact it creates. And while she said she couldn’t comment on some HR issues, she acknowledged that her leadership means sometimes grappling with her own blindspots.
“I’m a white leader running an organization that is doing racial equity, racial justice work,” she said. “I recognize the importance of and the nuance and complexity of that role, and I’m the first person to always say part of being in my job is understanding privilege.”
Several former employees said they believed in the mission of CWK but were shocked to learn member businesses collectively owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to CWK for kitchen hours and storage fees. Several recounted learning some longtime members didn’t have a basic understanding of their cost of goods — a key element in manufacturing.
That was Sherie Theriault’s experience. She ran a salsa business out of CWK from 2011 through 2018 and accrued $40,000 in debt for kitchen use and packaging fees. She said she received no real coaching on how to grow and felt trapped.
“I dug into a hole I couldn’t get out of, no matter much how much salsa I sold,” Theriault recalled. “Not one person sat down with me and looked at the cost of goods and told me how to scale this.”
Eventually, Faigel and CWK wrote off Theriault’s debt, and she became a small business coach to help others avoid the same fate. In the years since, she’s been hired back to CWK twice as a consultant and said she sees the same vicious cycle playing out. The businesses they tout, she said, aren’t as healthy as they could be.
“If you looked at their real financials,” she said, “they’re not success stories.”
Some former employees, too, described feeling burned.
Misha Thomas was recruited from Roxbury’s Haley House in 2022 and was excited to join CWK. But Thomas quickly became concerned with how Faigel interacted with staff, saying she pitted workers against each other and made insensitive comments about race and identity.
Thomas said that after experiencing snide remarks, condescending statements, and public shaming by Faigel, Thomas took those concerns to a board member, only to later walk in on Faigel complaining to a colleague that Thomas, who is Afro-Indigenous, was “playing the race card.” (Faigel said she had no recollection of that conversation and Thomas had not communicated any concerns directly to her.)
Eventually, Thomas left CommonWealth Kitchen.
“I remember being really uncomfortable with her style of leadership,” Thomas said. “It was totally different from what I experienced at a healthy nonprofit.”
Lee Ann Song felt similarly.
Inspired by CWK’s mission, Song took a job there as director of development after graduating from Harvard and then Tufts with a master’s in innovation. She found CWK’s finances confounding and said Faigel routinely overpromised and underdelivered on grant applications. Song said she was so stressed about her mental health that she took a six-month leave, only to learn later Faigel had disclosed her medical issues to a colleague, which she felt was a serious violation of her privacy.
“I felt [Faigel] had control over me and she could badmouth me to the entire fund-raising world,” Song said.
In June, Song was terminated. At least two-dozen other staffers quit or were fired in 2023 and 2024, according to one employee who kept a running tally. Another former employee’s spouse said they’d leave them if they didn’t find another job. The turnover continues: CWK’s chief program officer recently departed after just nine months in the role.
Mary Doucette, who was hired as a consultant at CWK in 2023, described an atmosphere where Faigel would routinely badmouth employees and created a culture that had people fearful and doubting themselves.
“The language, and the verbiage, was so caustic,” she said. “Rather than it just being a business conversation, it was really personal attacks on people.”
In 2021, the board of directors intervened, telling Faigel they wanted new leadership because of mismanagement, communication issues, and culture concerns.
Faigel said she was surprised at the turn, having received a raise and positive performance review just months earlier. She pushed back, prompting five of the six outside board members to leave en masse. Disruptions continued last year when the new chair stepped down after being fired from her law firm.
For most of the past year, the board was down to just four members, one of whom is Faigel. Small-business consultant Jae Gustavo thought he would be a fifth.
Gustavo said Faigel recruited him last fall, and he began working with members while awaiting final approval. After first seeing the email from Ramirez, and then the anonymous May Day missive, Gustavo said he reached out to staffers and members about their concerns.
Two days after the May letter, he emailed his presumed colleagues on the board a plan to navigate the crisis. A response came two weeks later, from board chair Sheldon Lloyd. Gustavo was no longer invited to join.
In retrospect, Gustavo said, the concerns in that email rang true.
“People don’t trust the organization to do what it needs to do to fix itself,” he said.
Faigel said Gustavo was among a slate of candidates under consideration and there were some outstanding questions about whether his work as a business consultant for CWK members might pose a conflict of interest. Three new board members were added to the organization’s website late last month.
And Lloyd, the board chairman, defended Faigel, noting “more than one hundred businesses employing more than 5,000 people were launched with the help of this organization.
“Like many young, rapidly growing organizations, we have had our challenges,” he wrote. “The food services industry overall was hit particularly hard by COVID and post-COVID labor turnover. We are always looking to improve and enhance how we do things.”
Faigel, too, said she has taken steps to improve the climate at CWK: hosting town hall meetings for members and listening to concerns as they arise. She’s rebuilt the board and is hiring a new chief operating officer. The complaints in the May Day email? “Old news,” she said. CWK is moving forward, and has a lot to be proud of.
“There’s an absurd amount of good stuff this organization has done right, even in the worst times,” Faigel continued. “The impact this organization has had and will continue to have is real.”
Still, the anonymous email and the sentiment it reflects are rippling through CWK’s community. Some members pushed back and criticized its writer for calling for transparency while staying anonymous.
“[D]o not speak for all Black entrepreneurs or for all members of this kitchen without their consent,” wrote Jermaine Tulloch, who co-owns Family Affair Catering. “Our community is not a monolith.”
Others questioned the timing of the email, noting staff turnover has mostly stabilized and infighting doesn’t feel productive given the mounting economic challenges food startups face.
“Right now it seems like they have a pretty good crew that is trying their hardest to do what is needed and balance it all,” said Alys Myers, who runs Supply Bulk Foods. “It does seem like a huge endeavor.”
But these complaints have been building for years, and some former CWK members and staff say they resonated for a reason: People feel tokenized and trapped. Lecorps certainly did.
When she thinks back on her time at CommonWealth Kitchen, she realizes how the nonprofit benefits from keeping startups under its roof. They give Faigel a steady base of paying tenants, products to sell, and feel-good stories to share with donors.
But at some point, she said, the goal is to leave. Entrepreneurs like her want to be out on their own and she wishes CWK did more to help make that happen.
“I didn’t leave CommonWealth Kitchen confidently. I left CommonWealth Kitchen because I was having a mental breakdown,” she said. “And I was lucky I was able to.”
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.