If you ask Giovanna Mantilla what she loves about living in City Heights, she will tell you it is because it is a tight-knit community.
“It’s so different from every other community I’ve lived in,” she told NBC 7 while sharing that she has lived in other areas and has plenty to compare it to. Mantilla explained that she moved to the United States from Mexico with her mother when she was nine years old, then spent 12 years moving until finally finding a home in City Heights eight years ago.
It was 16 years ago that she founded Lumily, her small business.
“Lumily is a company that partners with women artisans around the world that make beautiful handmade products and also uplift women,” Mantilla said, while she added that she now works with 200 women and has personal relationships with many of them, including one who named her daughter after Giovanna.
“Community is so important to me,” she reiterated, so when she heard that some of her neighbors in City Heights wouldn’t be receiving their full, federal food assistance benefits through the SNAP program, she knew she had to do something.
“How can an accessories brand that makes jewelry and handbags help our community? I felt helpless,” she said. Then, she had an idea.
“If people are going hungry, then I can bake bread,” she said.
Mantilla, who began baking sourdough from a 100-year-old starter two years ago for family and friends, posted a video to the Lumily TikTok and Instagram pages that invited community members in need to order a loaf of bread.
“We’re giving away free bread and, yes, we’re an accessories brand,” Mantilla said in a video posted on Oct. 31. Within the first 48 hours, she said, 50 to 60 messages poured into the Lumily accounts. Most of them were people asking for bread, others were people wanting to donate to the cause and, she said, a small fraction were negative so she “thanked them for their engagement and moved on.”
“It was just like starting my business,” Mantilla said. “When I started my business I wondered what an impact I could make to women around the world, just little old me, and now that has grown to over 200 artisans we could support and, so, it was the same thing with the bread. Even if I could just make a few loaves at a time that actually feeds a family, so let’s start with that.”
Mantilla was baking in her home kitchen around the clock until she said another small business, a bakery, offered to help with some loaves in the past week. Since Nov. 1, she said nearly 30 loaves have been picked up.
“Every single person who has picked up has been a woman and most of them have been single moms,” she said. “A lot of them said that they don’t have the luxury to buy fresh bread for their kids and that they love it. I invited every single one of them to come back and get more the next week and the week after that.”
Mantilla said she plans to continue to bake bread to give away to community members for free, regardless of when SNAP benefits are restored in-full.
“Even though it’s one loaf of bread, it makes a huge difference,” Mantilla added.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
