Success!
Home Kitchen, the homeless restaurant wins training grant.
Asociat are delighted to announce that our application to the Savoy Educational Trust, on behalf of Home Kitchen for a grant to support the training of their first cohort of recruits from the homeless community has been successful.
We were notified of the decision by their board of trustees in the week before Christmas. We will reveal the value at a later date, but it is a significant sum and is yet another indication that we are onto something big with this initiative.
The aim of the Savoy Educational Trust is the advancement and development of education, training and qualifications within the hospitality industry – to invest in both the present and future skills needs of the industry.
A part of the Home Kitchen mission is to address the recruitment crisis in the hospitality sector. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported as many as 400,000 jobs were unfilled in UK pubs and restaurants. As recently as November 2022, UK catering and hospitality had the second highest level of unfilled jobs vacancies – healthcare was at number one.
At about the same time, UK Hospitality CEO Kate Nicholls MBE warned the UK government that massive labour shortages were holding the sector back.
Meanwhile, there is a community of people who, due to flawed public perceptions, are seen as unemployable – that is the 273,000 UK homeless people. A number that threatens to grow even wider in 2023 under the current economic conditions. This is the other pillar of Home Kitchen’s mission; to change attitudes and flawed perceptions about the homeless, and end this unjust social issue by proving you can make a success of employing homeless people.
The awarding of this grant is another step along the road to reversing negative perceptions of homeless people while taking a different angle on solving two crises at once!
Special thanks go to our training partners, the amazing Beyond Food Foundation and all those supporting Home Kitchen with recruitment and pastoral support: Crisis, The Passage, Beam and our corporate supporters at:
SpaceandPeople Plc, Zurich Community Trust, and Dentsu
Story: Homeless restaurant wins training grant – 5th Jan 2022.
