What are Community Kitchens and how do they contribute to achieving your mission?

Through cooking food and enjoying the fruits of their labour, community kitchen participants develop their food skills; make some important social connections and take home both food and knowledge to share with their families.

There are currently five community kitchens at The Stop: Meals Made Easy (our flagship program), a Spanish cooking group, Kids in the Kitchen, a Healthy Beginnings kitchen for pregnant women and new mothers, and our newest kitchen for teenage girls. Participants share in the preparation of the food, with the assistance of a facilitator, which they then share together and plan the next week’s recipes.

The community kitchens program contributes to our mission by providing access to healthy food in two meaningful ways: through meals and through food skills education. Working together to prepare food and then sharing in the results of their collective effort are the ideas that drive the community kitchens at The Stop. Food is used as a tool through which the gaps of social isolation are bridged and connections made to each other and to a greater community both inside and outside of our organization.

In addition, the food produced and consumed in community kitchens is healthy and delicious, and in a number of cases, it is the most substantial source of nutrition that participants receive in 1-2 days. The food skills education component of the program allows the learning to be more dynamic and meaningful, as participants use the information from programming to enhance their everyday lives.