The weekend before Thanksgiving, the gymnasium in Ted Watkins park in the south Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts was crowded with more than 100 families. For three hours, they ate and talked while their kids ran around and a DJ blasted west coast hip-hop staples during games of limbo and musical chairs.
Toward the back of the room, people clamored around a step-and-repeat to get a picture with the event’s organizers: four siblings known as the sisters of Watts, who for the past decade have arranged food giveaways, backpack drives and after-school activities for kids growing up on the same blocks they did. At this event, there were bags of fresh produce available for families that wanted them.
The non-profit organization is led by two of the Daniels sisters: Keisha and Robin, who were raised within the 2.2 sq miles that make up Watts. These types of events are meant to give families time to play and connect with each other all while getting resources that can address the concerns they have long faced, such as food and housing insecurity.
This desire to serve their neighbors was embedded in the Daniels sisters while they grew up in the 1970s and 80s. Their grandmother brought them to church outings where they gave food to unhoused people, and their mother was a “community mom” who welcomed the sisters’ friends to hang out in their home.
“We felt like there was a disconnect between families. They’re not bonded like they used to be,” said Keisha Daniels, the COO of Sisters of Watts. “Our parents would have us go and be involved in the community. We were out playing, at the park all the time doing swimming lessons, drill team, getting free lunch. And we thought: ‘Man, these kids just aren’t doing this anymore.’”
The Sisters of Watts team feeding the community. Photograph: Courtesy of Sisters of Watts
The enthusiastic reception the Sisters of Watts got during their event reflects the integral role they’ve come to play in the community, said the state assembly member Mike Gipson, whose district includes Watts.
“A lot of people have made it, who were born and raised in the community of Watts, and never come back to give. But the sisters of Watts have never forgotten their roots. They’ve never left and that’s what makes them so special,” Gipson said while presenting a certificate of recognition to the sisters for their “outstanding dedication and support of families”.
For nearly a decade, the sisters have been punching above their weight in an effort to get families out of their homes to interact with one another and get some relief from the daily pressures they face. The group was originally founded by Robin and Keisha, their sisters Jessica Crummie and Penny Daniels, Robin’s daughter Cynthia Leonard, the sisters’ cousin Joann Smith and their friends Tamecia Citizen and Tamatha Clemons.
In the 10 years the organization has existed, it has held giveaways of all kinds, sponsored youth basketball and cheerleading teams and been involved in heavier matters like finding housing and providing supportive services for people escaping domestic violence, coming out of homelessness or returning home from incarceration.
“They stand in the gap for communities that don’t have resources,” Gipson, also a Watts native, said.
For Izell Leonard Sr, support from the Sisters of Watts allowed him to use the baking skills he learned while incarcerated to build a business once he got out.
“When I came home, they could have easily straight-armed me and said: ‘Nah, man, we’re not dealing with you,’ but they didn’t do that. They embraced me fully and helped me mature my business,” he said during the Thanksgiving event.
Leonard, who donated banana pudding to the Thanksgiving food giveaway, is originally from Watts and knew the sisters growing up. He spent more than 20 years in prison, and eventually became the lead baker at a fire camp in northern California, where he worked alongside his son, who was also incarcerated. Leonard was released in 2019 and says the Sisters of Watts worked with another non-profit to buy him a mixer so he could continue to bake.
He started off selling his goods on a street corner in Watts and now has a formal business called Tastebud Approved through which he sells sweets to the Los Angeles unified school district and Kaiser Permanente hospitals. He also founded his own non-profit, where he teaches teens about the realities and consequences of street life in an effort to keep them out of it.
“It’s crazy but all of this derived from them embracing me when I first came home and buying that mixer,” he said.
In October, his son, Izell Leonard Jr, was shot and killed in south LA. Leonard says he was proud that they got to spend time mending their relationship in and outside of prison. His son was able to see him build his business and give back to the community. “I prayed for my son to see me as the man I am today,” Leonard said. “It was for him to see that change was possible.”
Children playing in the backyard of the Sisters of Watts’s safe house. Photograph: Courtesy of Sisters of Watts
Despite the sisters’ reach, and the frequency and scale of their events – their most recent back-to-school event drew nearly 4,000 people from throughout Los Angeles – the non-profit has operated on a thin budget and largely subsists on donations, on money from the Daniels sisters’ pockets and on small grants of a few thousand dollars.
In 2021, they got their first big grant: $100,000 from the Los Angeles police department’s community safety partnership program. This allowed them to build their “stay fit” program, take families on field trips, offer tutoring to local kids and offer stipends to youth and adults who volunteered with the organization.
“They became like our family,” Daniels said of their volunteers.
They hope this grant will show donors that they can handle bigger grants. Otherwise, they rely on partnerships with other organizations, private donations and the goodwill of their neighbors, like the one who allowed them to host their first back-to-school drive in their yard in 2016.
“We are not ashamed to say: ‘This is what we need,’” Keisha Daniels said. “We try to partner with a lot of people. It’s not about us, so we’re always asking: ‘What are you doing? Do you need us to come?’”
Watts is one of the city’s best-known areas. Over the years, its associations have leaned toward the negative, including memories of 1990s-era gang violence and the notorious uprisings in 1965 and 1992, both of which were sparked by police mistreatment in the then-mostly Black neighborhood.
But many residents see the neighborhood differently. “Watts is a gem that just needs to be shined,” said John Jones III, CEO of the East Side Riders Bike Club, a non-profit that gives out bikes, teaches bike-safety workshops and hosts rides that are meant to give local youth something to do with their down time besides getting into trouble.
Today, Watts is mostly Latino and still home to primarily working-class and lower-income families with needs that are far-ranging, from housing, school uniforms and diapers to money for groceries and car repairs.
Jones, who also pitched in to get Leonard’s mixer, has been running the bicycling non-profit since 2008, and first met the Daniels sisters around 2016. Back then, they were “a bunch of eager young ladies who grew up in the community”, Jones said.
He gave them the lay of the land: which programs and groups they should collaborate with and how important it was to be nimble and able to adjust the mission to what the community was calling for.
Since then, they’ve become staples in the community and an integral part of Watts’s non-profit landscape, showing up for events put on by other groups in south Los Angeles to help and to spread the word to their 13,000 Instagram followers.
In 2024, Sisters of Watts opened a community “safe house” that the sisters purchased in the cul de sac where they grew up. It’s meant to be a place where kids can do their homework, play in the backyard and have movie nights and families can do their laundry, get food and take clothes out of the organization’s “giving closet”.
Though they’ve grown and received a bevy of acknowledgements and awards, including the key to Watts, the sisters still face financial challenges, which led them to temporarily shutter their after-school program. After they posted about the program’s closure, they received two donations that will allow them to reopen it in the new year, but it’s not enough to keep it open permanently. Despite the precariousness, Keisha Daniels says she is proud of what she and her sisters have built and the embrace they’ve been given by the people they grew up with and the children who play on the same streets they used to.
“We’ve done so much from the heart that now our names are not Keisha, Robin, Penny and Jessica. People just say: ‘Hey, sisters of Watts!’ Which is cool and a great accomplishment: that you lose your name and become known as your brand,” Keisha said.
