Home Kitchen

Written By Antony Ward

Home Kitchen is a diner with a difference...

Home Kitchen is a not for profit aiming to recruit and employ homeless people in the kitchen and front of house, while paying a living wage and training everyone in a professionally recognised qualification in catering. I was inspired to help homeless people after I got involved in volunteering at the Soup Kitchen London – a registered charity that helps to ease the burden of being homeless for homeless people. My partners in this new social enterprise are soup kitchen director Alexander Brown, and trustee Michael Brown.

Resilience (a quality the homeless have in droves) is a transferable skill set! Home Kitchen is going to prove it.

With the support of some wonderful partners and sponsors we’ve come a long way.

Zurich Community Trust have been our first corporate donors, and the fabulous Robert Kuchinski, of Zurich Insurance has been a very generous private donor, and has been tirelessly helping to drive our crowdfunding campaign.

We have our training partners – Beyond Food Foundation; a fantastic charity specialising in recruiting and training vulnerable people into the catering and hospitality sector. Our recruits will participate in an intensive, City & Guilds assured, training course before coming to work at Home Kitchen.

Thanks to the wondrous folks at SpaceandPeople Plc and the retail team at Network Rail we have our restaurant site – subject to funding closure, we’re taking over the old Frankie & Benny’s at Victoria Station!

There’s a little way to go yet – we’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to help meet our overheads and right now, were recruiting people to help us with fundraising. If you can help with a little time, (and failing that, a little money!) then DM me or go here:  https://chuffed.org/project/home-kitchen-diner-the-social-impact-restaurant

 
Why now?
Right now there are 400K vacancies in UK restaurants and pubs – no one wants these jobs!

And yet...
There are 274,000 homeless people in the UK (latest figures from Shelter).

Meanwhile, according to Crisis, 42% of all UK bosses would fire a member of staff if they became homeless – stereotypes skew the picture. Home Kitchen aims to be a successful case study to help change those perceptions and encourage others to get behind this community - to unlock more support, create more Home Kitchens and get more vulnerable people into work.

Antony Ward

Hi I am a marketeer specialising in the Hospitality industry and I offer a host of services to by clients including web design, email marketing, content creation, project management, event management, photography to name but a few. I have been building websites using SquareSpace for 5 years now.

https://www.bitehospitality.co.uk
Previous

Roy Castle Foundation
Next

Dirty Velvet Collaboration