Grassroots Bakers Effect Change, One Cupcake at a Time

Lilia Marshall contemplates the coffee menu at a local coffeeshop, debating quietly with her mom, Jennifer, what to order.

“What’s a dirty chai?” Jennifer wonders aloud. After learning that a dirty chai has a shot of espresso in it, Lilia decides on a regular chai latte.

It’s the day before the start of the new school year, and Lilia will be starting 11th grade at Austin ISD’s Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy. Since February, she and her mom have been volunteering with Bake Back Better, a grassroots group that raises money for progressive organizations and candidates.

“I enjoy baking and it seemed like a good opportunity to get into some sort of political activism,” says Lilia. “And I don’t have much time, like I have a lot of homework and stuff. So I didn’t want something that would take away too much from that.”

“When I first got involved, it felt refreshing to have the opportunity to make a difference in a way that felt doable,” Jennifer adds. “I’m a school teacher. I’m a mom. There’s a lot of demands on my time. This felt like something that we could do together, which was really important. A way that we could have fun that was accessible to her.” The mother-daughter duo has baked in a number of Bake Back Better cycles, along with a couple of Lilia’s friends, even delivering cupcakes to the offices of Representatives Sheryl Cole and Gina Hinojosa at the Capitol building.

Milana Noueilaty, the leader of Bake Back Better Texas’s Austin hub, was also compelled to join the cupcake ranks by her child. She describes 10-year-old Kaden as very politically and fairness-minded, having advocated for mask mandates in his classroom during the 2021-22 school year. “He was my main motivation for getting more involved in politics and stuff in general,” says Noueilaty. “I’ve always been on the sidelines. But he’s become a huge advocate. He can get out there and meet people, and he likes to talk to the people we’re dropping off the cupcakes for. Sometimes it’s hard to get him to go on to the next delivery.”

It’s quite possible that, thanks to initiatives like Bake Back Better, Lilia and Kaden represent both the past and the future of grassroots fundraising and civic engagement.

Bake Back Better

Bake Back Better was founded in the California Bay Area by Dina Jacobson during the 2020 election, first raising funds for the Biden-Harris campaign, then for various Turn Georgia Blue campaigns. Since then, the organization has added fundraising hubs in Dallas, Austin, Houston, Seattle, and Iowa, with an eye toward generating monies for progressive groups and candidates by exchanging cupcakes for donations.

Here’s how it works: During a fundraising cycle, which usually lasts about three weeks, community members can make a suggested donation of $25 to the partner organization or campaign. Three days after the donation window closes, volunteer bakers fire up their ovens and bake dozens (two dozen per volunteer) of cupcakes and package them into four-count trays, which are then decorated with ribbons and messages (depending on the baker). Then, a fleet of volunteer drivers delivers the cupcakes to donors’ homes, or to designated recipients like firefighters, nurses, teachers, and so on.

Among the beneficiaries of this cupcake activism – apart from, you know, democracy and society as we know it – have been the Texas Civil Rights Project, Somos Tejas, Battleground Texas, and the campaigns of gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and land commissioner candidate Jay Kleberg. September’s Austin cycle will benefit the reelection campaign of Travis County Judge Andy Brown.

“Since our super high-profile campaign of supporting Biden, we have shifted focus to more localized campaigns and operations where $5,000-$7,000 per campaign can really move the needle in what somebody’s doing,” says Jacobson.

She shares the story of the Democratic club in Tracy, Calif., which lost its office during COVID. The loss of that hub for Democrats in that purplish community led to decreased engagement, which can be devastating in an era when every single vote in every single election matters. “We did a Bake Back Better for them in June and raised more than $7,000 and they opened their doors again in July. That was so gratifying, so exciting. You can see the power of a cupcake.”

Women Get Shit Done

As you might have suspected, most of the volunteers for Bake Back Better identify as women, and they’re joining a long line of women throughout history who have wielded their whisks in service to a bigger cause. Indeed, the 20th-century bake sale has been an almost exclusively feminist, sometimes intersectional, phenomenon.

Says KC Hysmith, a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of North Carolina, “The first bake sales that we might compare to modern-day iterations started to pop up around the turn of the 20th century when big issues like suffrage and WWI along with more local needs including church repairs or school fundraisers inspired people to organize and use the skills they could readily rely on such as baking.”

She points out that bake sales contributed materially to the civil rights movement, particularly by Georgia Gilmore’s Club From Nowhere in Montgomery, Ala. Gilmore and her compatriots sold fried chicken meals and sweet potato pies to raise money for the Montgomery Improvement Association, “an organization formed following the arrest of Rosa Parks and helmed by Martin Luther King Jr.,” explains Hysmith.

Here in Austin, the folks behind the Big Bake Sale for Social Justice have organized citywide bake sales to raise money for various social causes, including a curbside bake sale in June 2020 that generated nearly $11,000 for the Austin Justice Coalition and Communities of Color United in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent racial reckoning. In 2018, the same group raised more than $12,000 for RAICES with its Big Bake Sale for Border Families. And there’s talk of a Big Bake Sale in September to raise money for abortion rights.

“I think that there are a whole lot of people out there who care deeply about social justice issues and are looking for ways to help,” says Mary Helen McNally, one of about a half-dozen women who organize the Big Bake Sales. “The sense of community that grows around these sales, that keeps folks invested and enthusiastic. We get to feel like we are not alone in our beliefs, and that is an incredibly rewarding and motivating thing – especially in the heart of Texas.”

And, in July of this year, former Olamaie pastry chef Jules Stoddart organized a collection of local pastry chefs for the My Body, My Choice bake sale to benefit Every Body Texas, a nonprofit that works to expand sexual and reproductive health care across the state, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The sellout event, in which supporters paid $35 for a box of high-end pastries from folks like Stoddart, Kendall Melton, Laura Sawicki, and others, raised $14,000 in short order.

“We’re certainly not politicians by any sense, but I do feel confident that we are activists,” says Melton. “Our language just happens to be edible. I find personally that my baking is better when I’m enraged, and if I can rage-bake for a great organization, even better.”

Simply put, when you need to raise tens of thousands of dollars in a hurry, find a pissed-off woman who bakes and she’ll hook you up.

Says Jacobson of the volunteer workforce for Bake Back Better: “I’m just gonna say women get shit done. They’re just as busy as men. They are busier than men. You know, it is a traditional role model kind of a thing where women traditionally bake, but there’s all kinds of ways to get involved in Bake Back Better. You can drive, you can help with marketing.”

Turning Flour Into Social Change

Kids like Lilia and Kaden don’t drive and can’t yet vote. Yet they’re finding ways to effect change from within the kitchen (with an assist from parental infrastructure), transcending gendered domestic roles in the process. It’s exciting to consider that they may be at the vanguard of how Genera­tions Z and Alpha approach activism, as they’re learning how to engage with causes they believe in from an early age, when previous generations discovered activism in college.

“They need to understand that they have power and they don’t have to sit and wait till they’re 18,” says Noueilaty, who recently baked – with Kaden – for a mini-cycle benefiting Austin City Council District 9 candidate Zohaib Qadri (the minimum suggested donation for this mini-­cycle was $200; the estimated total donations earned for this cycle is $2,000).

Says chef Pascal Simon, proprietor of kids cooking school Bake Austin, “Kids have to spend a lot of time being told what they need to do. It can be so frustrating when social and political decisions are made but you are still too young to vote to work toward a change.

“Giving them an opportunity, like baking for a cause, is a wonderful way for them to get involved in what they believe in.” What’s more, she adds, baking is not only the perfect vehicle for kids to learn life skills and develop independence, it also empowers them to add their voices to civic discourse.

“It is important to see as an adult that kids do care, it is their future too, and witnessing kids getting involved in social and political change is a great reminder for us to also make our voices heard. We are truly all in this together,” Simon says.

As for Lilia, whose mother describes her as introverted, she plans to start a Bake Back Better student club at LASA, expanding beyond the small group of three teens she’s been baking with this year. “I’m hoping to have some more bakers and hopefully drivers, like juniors or seniors who have gotten their license,” she explains. Part of the club’s activities will include researching organizations and deciding together whom they should raise money for.

“My hope is that students use school to find others who care deeply about the issues that matter to them,” says LASA Principal Stacia Crescenzi. “Activism gives students a sense of purpose and allows them to feel connected to others who share similar concerns or even with those who are committed to an issue but have different ideas about how it can be solved.

“It’s never too early to find your voice,” she adds. “The only two ingredients you need are an issue you are passionate about and an open mind.”

This article appears in September 2 • 2022.