Stephen Cue Jn-Marie
Stephen Cue Jn-Marie
The Hip Hop Smoothie Shop
Los Angeles, CA
The Hip-Hop Smoothie Shop, a worker-owned co-op and social enterprise, provides living wage employment and employee ownership to residents of Skid Row in LA as well as providing nutritious food in a food desert. Stephen Cue Jn-Marie, a former Virgin Records rapper now known as Pastor Cue, founded the Hip Hop Smoothie Shop as a part of Creating Justice LA, a non-profit that advances justice through creative expression. Creating Justice LA recently opened the Peace and Healing Center on Skid Row which serves as a resource for Skid Row residents, sheltered and unsheltered, to access free programming, nutritious food & drink, and all the benefits of a “third space”.
About: Known as Pastor Cue, Stephen Cue Jn-Marie founded The Row LA – also called “The Church Without Walls” 13 years ago. The former Virgin Records rapper turned evangelist, activist and organizer, left the music business in 1994 and founded Creating Justice LA.
The Hip Hop Smoothie shop is “essentially a mobile Hip Hop Museum that engages all of the senses—the sound of Hip Hop music, the taste of organic, healthy smoothies, which all are named after significant events in the history of Hip Hop, and which highlight the roots of the socially conscious form of HipHop, which has inspired movements for social justice around the world,” writes Jn-Marie.
“Creating Justice LA, and the Hip HopSmoothie shop are rooted in the Liberation teachings of Jesus The HHSS is rooted in the Skid Row community of Los Angeles, which is affected by a history of systemic racism in housing, health care, employment, and policing.”
“The Hip Hop Smoothie Shop represents an alternative to the injustices of capitalism, in which private and publicly held corporations value profits over people. The HHSS flips this model on its head by paying all employees a living wage and making the employees of the enterprise the owners who share in the profits produced by their work, and provides nutritious food and empowering cultural knowledge to those ignored and exploited by for-profit corporations,” said Jn-Marie.