‘Our Mission is to help improve the lives of those in the community that need it most.’
Mike Donovan Founder of London and Bermondsey Community Kitchen
WHAT WE DO
From providing nutritious meals for the elderly to teaching new skills to the young, disadvantaged and disabled, our aim is not just to help improve peoples lives, but also to teach life skills to enable them to help themselves.
We teach cooking skills, and also show members of the community how they can grow their own vegetables and maintain a productive vegetable patch all year round.
Our cooking courses have changed the lives of many inividuals, and we provide classes for special needs children and adults. The feedback we receive is that participants have shown a marked improvement in their attention span along with the fact that they thouroghly enjoy them.
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
Our work is entirely dependant on grants and donations. With constraints on local authority budgets, we are finding it much more difficult to provide the help to the members of the community that desparately need it.
If you wish to provide us with a donation to help us contunue our work, you can do it at our crowdfunding page by scanning the QR code.
Welcome to the Bermondsey Community Kitchen, which is now incorporating the Southwark and London Community Kitchen.
Our board of trustees decided that including the name London along with Bermondsey, reflected our mission to extend our community support to neighbouring or nearby boroughs across London.
Since its formation, we have expanded our initial single program to encompass other much-needed community issues which were highlighted by the Covid pandemic.
Changing lives in London. We’ve done it before.
Our programs:
Training unemployed 18 to 40-year-olds to obtain a City and Guilds Level 2 professional cookery qualification and promote them into full-time employment through our employment network.
Provide courses in Level 1, 2 and 3 Food Hygiene and Allergen Awareness courses, open to all community organisations run through the Chartered Institution of Environmental Health.
Run basic healthy eating cooking on a budget classes for the elderly with no age limit.
Provide the equipment and materials required to operate raised growing boxes on local social housing estates encouraging residents to grow their own vegetables and liaise with other residents otherwise unknown to them this includes working with local primary schools.
We have a catering trailer which provides students with the ability to enter the catering business whilst providing entrepreneurial skills and assist in community functions with events on a non-profit basis.
We have obtained an independent community café. This café provides the first step for qualified students to enter the commercial catering industry increasing their CV status and getting valuable work experience skills in all areas required to run a business including cooking, cash flows, bookkeeping, purchasing, customer service skills, barista skills and much more.
All the above programs are free