Community Kitchen: For the Future
There are any number of reasons why a project may end up being shelved, and it is never an easy decision to make. A lot of work goes into establishing a project and trying to get it off the ground, particularly when the work is ensuring that the project is community-based and reaching out to as many people as possible. However, all this work means that there are valuable lessons to take away from the efforts of trying to establish a project, even if that project ends up not happening.
We aimed to launch a Community Kitchen to reduce food waste and provide a space in the community where people could access help and support. The idea of a Community Kitchen has been popular with residents for a long time, having been prioritised as an idea in our Pilot Phase. We have previously surveyed residents on this before in 2023 with much wider parameters. Those results suggested that people wanted to see a community kitchen in Selby that offered meals, cookery courses and a recipe exchange. However, due to lack of resources and further interest, the project was put on the backburner.
Fast-forward to earlier this year. Our Zero Selby has hit the ground running and we have seen project success with tree planting, composting, our Zero Hero events and our repair cafés- see our Projects page, news articles and blogs for more information! We restarted the conversation around the Community Kitchen, especially as we’d had Mel in from FoodAware CIC to do one of our Zero Hero Talks on industrial food waste and it had left us wondering what contribution of our own we could make. In addition, our charity Up For Yorkshire had recently acquired the St. Richard’s Centre on Abbot’s Road which we identified as a potential venue.
We launched a Community Kitchen conversation at Up For Yorkshire’s Wellcome Café with three main questions at its heart:
What would motivate you to come to the Community Kitchen?,
If we had a thriving community kitchen in Selby, what positive things could it offer our community?
What are some of the potential challenges or obstacles we might face in setting up and running a community kitchen?
We ran further conversations at outreach events, such as the Abbey’s Eco-Fayre and the Selby Family Funday. In addition, we launched an online survey to get views from a wider range of people.
Residents’ responses were in overall agreement.
Common motivations for coming to a community kitchen included:
Reducing food waste
Learning how to cook
New food and dishes to try
Being a part of the community
Positive benefits to Selby offered by a community kitchen included:
Reducing food waste
Tackling social isolation through togetherness and friendships
Developing the community
Promoting better cooking confidence and skills
Promoting healthy eating
Challenges and obstacles included:
Accessibility
Getting suitable food to cater for as many people as possible
Timings
Making the wider community aware
Recruiting and sustaining enough volunteers for the project to run
We have taken all this feedback on and are extremely grateful to the people who gave their time to us. Due to low overall resident interest and low volunteer numbers combined with other, bigger projects and our limited capacity, we have decided that we are currently not able to set up and help run a Community Kitchen.
However, this is not a total ‘goodbye’ nor do we see this as a failure. We have preserved the resident voice to ensure that people know that a Community Kitchen is a popular idea and can use local intelligence gathered from residents to ensure that the third time’s the charm! We are so excited by Shop For the Future and all our other projects currently running, so please join us as we continue to help Selby be more sustainable. Sign up to our newsletter, read our blogs, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to get involved.