People’s Kitchen Update

Every Tuesday at 10am since 2018, the doors to the cafe would open, crates of surplus food chosen and sorted, chopping boards, peelers and aprons distributed, and the space would be a-buzz with chatter, clatter and carrot peel. By midday all the prepped food would have been whizzed upstairs via our clanky dumb-waiter, to be transformed by chefs into a nutritious, free hot lunch for our community, then served up at 1pm to around 20-25 lovely regulars from all over Walthamstow and Leyton. Extra meals boxed up and labelled, to be distributed by bike to people who need them.

Bringing people together through food is a huge part of what we do, and People’s Kitchen has been an anchoring point of our activities. The conversations and connections, the care and the cultivated sense of belonging have become woven into the fabric of The Hornbeam, so much so that we continued to run the project beyond the end of specific project funding, for some time. However, the maths of paying chef and coordinator wages without external funding has come to a point of no longer really adding up. Subtracting, yes.

A beautiful aspect of People’s Kitchen is how the community supports each other. Not only are Hornbeam staff firmly connected to local social services, community groups and activities, many participants and volunteers come with a wealth of local knowledge and lived experience, sharing with and supporting each other with so much care, humour and wisdom.

Alongside of this are the stark realities of operating in an era of underfunded local mental health services, over-stretched council budgets, inadequate and expensive housing, the loneliness crisis, the cost-of-living crisis and unstable geo-politics. We have long and close working relationships with so many of the hard working Voluntary and Community Sector organisations, LBWF’s teams and branches of community services including the wonderful Social Prescribers. The signposting, referrals, meetings and updates are a busy local ecosystem of care that we are so proud to be a part of.

However, despite all the signposting, community care and local knowledge, sometimes we are unable to meet complex needs of an individual in crisis. Sometimes the signposting only goes so far and the gap between need, expectation and capacity is impossible to bridge within the boundaries of staff time, training, safety and wellbeing.

So, after much reflection we have come to the decision that we have to downsize our People’s Kitchen offering from weekly to monthly, due to reaching the concrete limits of our funding and staff capacity. We will still be welcoming people to help prepare and eat lunch together on the last Tuesday of the month, from 10am to 2pm. Chop and chat from 10, lunch served at 1pm. Spaces limited to 20 people max.

At first we were hesitant to share the realities of the challenges and changes, but we believe in transparency and being honest about the realities of running community projects that rely on funding. Many thanks!