COVID-19 continues to pose many challenges for businesses, but especially restaurants who have seen sales drop dramatically. During Hispanic Heritage Month 2021, we saw a chance to help these restaurants by showcasing their stories and their specialty dishes via social media videos. Each restaurant chose a day for their “Cash Mob” where the community was urged to pay for their orders with cash so the restaurants could reap the benefits immediately.

By aligning ourselves with local organizations that serve the Kansas City Hispanic community, we were able to reach a new audience. This is a community that is predominantly Spanish-speaking, so we shot and edited videos both in English and Spanish and utilized translated subtitles. This ensured that both English and Spanish speakers would have the opportunity to hear the stories from the restaurant owners and make plans to patronize the highlighted restaurants.

Our main goal of this project was to bring an influx of cash into struggling Hispanic-owned restaurants, but secondary outcomes were the cultural enrichment experienced by the new customers that tried new dishes and traveled to parts of town that they don’t typically frequent. We also were able to bring overall awareness of these restaurants to the community in which they reside. Simply put, now a lot more people know the stories, cuisine and culture of the Hispanic-owned restaurants in their community.