By Rick Hynum
Alessio Lacco and Sofia Arango, owners of Atlanta Pizza Truck and founders of Latinos en Pizza, picked an unusual site for their Atlanta-based nonprofit’s first-ever pizza festival. Then, again, this wasn’t your typical pizza festival.
Lacco and Arango partnered with community leaders in Quito, Ecuador, to host the Pizza Festival With Intention on Sunday, February 2. The key words were “with intention.” Because in addition to celebrating the world’s greatest food, this event raised funds for Hogar del Niño San Vicente de Paúl (Casa Hogar for short), a Catholic-run facility that houses and cares for abandoned, orphaned and at-risk children and youths.
It’s a special cause for Lacco, as PMQ has previously reported. He first visited Casa Hogar, located in a troubled section of Quito, last year. He went away smitten with the kids, all of whom have been essentially forgotten by society at large, and determined to help them build a better, more hopeful life when they turn 18 and have to venture out into the world alone.
Click here to donate to Latinos en Pizza’s GoFundMe campaign: ‘Empower Orphans in Quito With Culinary Skills‘
“I fell in love with the kids there, with the sisters, with the history,” Lacco told PMQ last month.
Casa Hogar is home to about 60 kids, including infants and toddlers as well as teenagers who face a bleak future on the streets of Quito, where crime cartels, drug dealers and pimps lurk in the shadows and eye their next victims. After leaving Casa Hogar, the facility’s teenagers will need real jobs so they can make their own way in the world, stay out of trouble, perhaps even stay alive.
But real jobs require marketable skills. That got Lacco thinking. “I was, like, I want to try to do something small, something I can do with the skills I have, which is pizza. So we started a conversation. What if we open a little pizza place where we teach the kids how to make pizza, and we donate a pizza oven and everything they need, and the orphanage keeps the profit?”
When the youths leave Casa Hogar, Lacco hopes, they will have the pizza-making skills they need to find work and start a new life on their own.
Building ‘The Pizzeria of Dreams’
Now called The Pizzeria of Dreams, the proposed pizza shop has become a key project for Latinos en Pizza, one that Lacco and Arango are tackling with their trademark gusto and passion. The Pizza Festival With Intention was the first step, raising local awareness of Casa Hogar’s plight and badly needed funds for the facility.
“I’m happy to share that the event was a great success!” Lacco told PMQ after the festival. It drew around 300 attendees and, after expenses, raised $1,700 for Casa Hogar.
“Most importantly, the kids had an incredible time,” he added. “The event was dedicated to them—they made pizzas, enjoyed great food, and the atmosphere was full of positive energy….This marks the successful completion of step one. The team of sisters managing the home were very pleased and happy with what we’re doing for them.”
Now for step two: Latinos en Pizza will present a formal proposal for Casa Hogar’s Pizzeria of Dreams to the facility’s supervising organization in France.
“The goal is to establish a long-term collaboration, not just for this project and this house [Casa Hogar] but for others that the organization operates in Latin America, and to build something that ensures sustainability and success for those kids,” Lacco said.
Meanwhile, Lacco and Arango are working to establish Latinos en Pizza as a legal nonprofit in Ecuador, which will create new opportunities to raise money, build out the planned pizzeria in Casa Hogar, and assist the facility in other ways. “Our first priority is to secure the approval of Casa Hogar’s main office for our collaboration, and from there, we’ll move forward with building the pizzeria inside their place,” Lacco said.
There have been other promising developments in Quito, too.
“Because the event was so successful and people now understand our mission and vision, we’ve already received offers to open a pizzeria in the city of Quito,” Lacco said. “This is an incredible opportunity that could allow us to move faster and provide jobs” for kids who have learned the pizza-making craft.
Additionally, Ecuadorians love soccer, and Lacco noticed that some of the youngsters at Casa Hogar dream of playing the game for a living. That led to another exciting development. “We had a representative from the Ecuadorian Soccer Federation attend the event,” Lacco noted. “They have offered to bring a few of the kids to their headquarters for trials, and if they are talented enough, they may have the opportunity to join the national team’s youth league.”
Meanwhile, finding a wood-burning pizza oven was looking to be a costly challenge for the Casa Hogar project. But a solution to that problem also presented itself, thanks to the Pizza Festival With Intention. Lacco said the Italian embassy in Ecuador has offered to donate an oven for the cause.
Always the First
Lacco is still in Ecuador this month and hard at work on the initiative. “Sofia and I see this as a really big and complex project,” he said. “Expanding into another country with different laws and regulations is challenging. While we do have some connections, they are still limited. Fortunately, we’re in a position where we can hire the right lawyers and professionals to navigate this process, but it’s still an unexpected and exciting journey for us.”
Lacco said the response from the Latinos en Pizza community has been “incredible.”
“People are already reaching out, seeing it as a great opportunity for their local communities, which I absolutely love,” he said. “It’s inspiring to see how we can spark ideas and motivate others to take action.
“Looking back, I feel like I’ve always been the one to take the first step. I brought the first AVPN-certified pizza truck to the world—something that had never been done before. It took me two years to convince AVPN, not as a business opportunity, but as a reflection of where the industry was heading. With Latinos en Pizza, we are the first and only organization truly celebrating the Latino pizza community. And now, with the orphanage project, we’re once again igniting conversations, bringing people together and creating meaningful change though pizza.”
For all his pizza smarts and innovative ideas, Lacco still follows his heart—and leads with it, too. “I love the people I’m surrounded by,” he said. “And I only wish I could do even more before my time is up.”
