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Kapwa Kultural Center & Cafe offers boba drinks as a gateway into the mental health and wellness support services it provides. The Daly City center is themed around kapwa — a Filipino word with no exact English equivalent — which embodies the homey feel and rich communal culture within the space.
“It’s a real sense of collective care, like ‘I care about you,’” said Christi Morales, one of Kapwa Kultural Center’s co-founders. “It’s the interconnectedness between us as people, and also with nature and the land. But you don’t have to be Filipino to feel kapwa.”
Open since 2024, the center was designed primarily for young adults who are 16-24 — “transition-age youth,” as Morales described — but anyone may find it worthwhile to come. Kapwa offers youth-based wellness services like its Safe Space Gatherings, wellness workshops and community discussions, as well as therapy and medication management.
But staff settled on serving boba because they thought it would be more “trendy” and appealing to their target market, said Stephanie Balon, the center’s other co-founder. Every drink purchased by customers supports cultural programming at Kapwa.
“We wanted to make sure we were honoring what the community, especially the youth, actually wanted,” Balon said. “What would help them feel safe, or actually want to come to this space? The resounding answer was boba.”
The cafe’s boba beverage menu features several drinks that pay homage to Filipino culture and ingredients, from Mountain Strawberries – “inspired by the farms of Benguet” with strawberry puree blended with milk and chocolate and topped with cold foam – to Kapwa, which is a tribute to the Philippine flag with layers of strawberry puree, milk, butterfly pea tea and a peach half, topped with cold foam. In addition to its cafe menu, the organization also offers boba catering.
The choice of boba was part of their effort to engage Filipino youth during a formative stage of their lives.
“Instead of meeting people at rock bottom, at their points of crisis, we wanted to do preventive intervention earlier on,” Balon said. “We chose adolescent youth because it was one of the most formative developmental stages in cultural identity formation.”
But the center’s approach is different from that of other wellness spaces. While Balon and Morales are both licensed therapists, they believe the often clinical feel of a counseling office can intimidate people and turn them away from seeking mental health support. Instead, they’ve elected to create a more casual and down-to-earth feel in the center.
“Even the words ‘mental health’ can be very triggering and activating for people,” Balon said. “Part of our work was to create a culturally attuned space where people can show up as themselves, and there was no pressure to go to therapy.”
They sought to make the experience alone of being in the center feel fully comforting and enlivening. Balon and Morales carried that intention into the center’s interior design, choosing to have light, earthy-green walls adorned with paintings and shelves displaying jewelry made by youth and local artisans.
“We talked about being a space that feels homely, welcoming and safe,” Morales said. “The way that we engage community is very simple — break bread, come together, talk story. It’s a very non-threatening, natural entry point.”
The Filipino designer of the space, Jason Nogoy, drew inspiration from the traditional Filipino bahay kubo, or nipa hut, incorporating modular structures that can be rearranged for performances, training, family celebrations and exercise classes.
He also drew from the concept of bayanihan, the long-standing Filipino practice of neighbors coming together to carry a family’s hut and support one another, which also represents the center’s value of collective care and kapwa.
“It’s also not just the space itself, it’s the people who populate it too,” Balon said. “There’s this buzz, this synergistic feel, like you’re at someone’s sala, a living room space, or someone’s house. When I say it feels like home, I mean like the sounds of the kids running around and the aunties cackling — it just feels like a vibe.”
Balon and Morales’ vision for the center was also shaped by their own Filipino coming-of-age stories and by the support they wished they had received. Growing up, both of them faced their share of mental health struggles, pressures of assimilation, lingering effects of colonial Filipino history and gradual loss of connection to Filipino culture, they said. Yet there were few spaces where they could heal from those experiences in a way that was personalized or culturally affirming.
“The Kapwa Kultural Center is a love letter to our younger selves, the space that I had been longing for, that I can now help build and co-create with other people,” Balon said.
Since Balon and Morales’ original vision for the center has come to fruition, they’ve worked to make it as open and inclusive as possible.
“You basically walk into a manifested dream,” Balon said. “For me, it started with my individual dream, when I was 19 years old and vividly imagined all the elements that you see now when you walk into the center. But it eventually evolved into a collective dream — it was really a labor of love that was co-created, with folks in the community who had a similar dream.”
Kapwa Kultural Center, 11-B San Pedro Road, Daly City; 650-993-4415, Instagram: @kapwakulturalcenter. Open Wednesday to Friday from noon to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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