Leadership Pasadena Cohort Collects Recipes Lost in the Eaton Fire for Community Cookbook

A group of community leaders enrolled in Leadership Pasadena’s 2026 program is asking Eaton Fire survivors to share recipes and short personal stories for a community cookbook that the cohort plans to print and distribute for free to contributors.

The project is one of the community impact efforts undertaken by this year’s Leadership Pasadena cohort, a class of local professionals who complete civic service projects as part of the six-month leadership program. The cohort is inviting residents to submit a meaningful dish along with a brief reflection about what the recipe represents, according to the group.

Among the losses during the Eaton Fire were personal belongings that no insurance check can replace — including handwritten recipe cards, annotated cookbooks and the culinary records families had built over generations.

The cohort says many neighbors lost those recipe collections in the fire. The organizers say the cookbook project is intended to rebuild a shared record of the region’s food traditions while giving contributors a way to tell their own stories through the dishes they prepare.

Submissions will be compiled into a printed cookbook, with plans for a possible companion website, according to the organizers. A launch event is planned where each contributor will receive a complimentary copy.

Leadership Pasadena, a nonprofit based at 75 S. Grand Ave., has operated its leadership development program since 1999. Each annual cohort of 20 to 25 participants completes community impact projects during the January-through-June program. More than 470 people have graduated from the program.

The 2025 cohort also directed its projects toward Eaton Fire recovery, completing work on mental health support kits, community connection spaces, fire-resistant rebuilding resources, adaptive reuse strategies and emergency communications improvements.

The cookbook project joins other community-driven recovery efforts that have emerged in the area since the fire. In May 2025, the owners of Now Serving, a cookbook store in Chinatown, collected wish lists from more than 400 fire victims seeking to replace cookbooks they had lost, according to the Pasadena Star-News.

Residents interested in submitting a recipe can do so through the cohort’s online submission form. Details on the submission process are available through Leadership Pasadena.