A compelling community opportunity

Home Kitchen is an opportunity for values driven brand partners to join Zurich Community Trust, Soup Kitchen London, Beyond Food Foundation, Network Rail, and Space and People in this unique collaboration with a much accoladed chef; to launch a diner with a difference – a restaurant that will employ, and train homeless people.

It is a life transforming and purpose based initiative we are developing with one of the most exciting talents of the British restaurant scene: Adam Simmonds who has achieved Michelin stars at 2 of his previous establishments and won multiple AA rosettes.

With Adam’s help we are aiming to create a temporary pop-up restaurant in London in 2023. Aside from the fact that a 2 Michelin Star chef will be helming both the menu and the kitchen, there is another major differentiating factor…

Our mission

We will recruit and train people from the homeless community to work at every level – from front of house to kitchen team to marketing.

We intend to pay all our recruits London living wage and underpin that with a catering qualification (City & Guilds Culinary Skills (or accredited equivalent) courtesy of our training partners – the catering and hospitality specialist, Westminster Kingsway College and Beyond Food Foundation – a charity who specialise in training and preparing homeless people for work in restaurants.

Our mission is to improve the future employability prospects of all our recruits, to lift them out of poverty and also to find them a meaningful and secure career in the industry, either with us at Home Kitchen, or our sponsors and partners or through our connections in the wider catering sector.

Importantly, we’ll create a compelling case for the social impact of Home Kitchen – to take to government and civic society to prove this model works. To unlock more support – to create more Home Kitchens wherever homelessness exists, and get more homeless people into work.

Our Location

Is a prime site in the Hoxton area of London. It has full professional kitchen facilities, and can cover 100 sittings simultaneously.

For those of you who have been with us reading earlier versions of this page, you will recall our original site was at the former Frankie & Benny’s in London Victoria Station. That site eventually fell through due to new development plans by the landlord. However, we are now at lease negotiation stage for another former restaurant with full kitchen facilities, in the Hoxton area. We’re (hopefully) close to signing.

Asociat have now secured multiple delivery partners to make this project a reality including Crisis, The Passage, Only A Pavement Away, Beam, Zurich Community Trust, Instant Brands, Budweiser Brewing Group and Pernod Ricard. Home Kitchen has also been added to The Big Issue’s Changemakers 2023 Top 100.

We’re now aiming to raise support to cover set up costs such as opening food stocks and business rates.

Home Kitchen will be run commercially. However, all surplus will be invested back into helping homeless people into meaningful work and improving their future potential.

You can download our budget breakdown here:

Home Kitchen Set_Menu_Model

Our Inspiration

Our Home Kitchen idea arose from our experiences of helping to run Soup Kitchen London* in Whitfield St in Central London.

This kitchen is a UK registered charity which rose to fame when we successfully closed funding to launch the world’s first mental-health drop-in centre inside a soup kitchen (August 2019). We secured coverage for this positive news story in BBC and ITV broadcast news and in The Guardian, the Big Issue and other news outlets.

*Our founder and our communities director are respectively trustee and director of operations at the Soup Kitchen.

Brand and Commercial Support

We are aiming to raise sponsorship or VIK support for Home Kitchen from a values driven, community focussed partner or partners. Additionally, we are aiming to place our recruits into a FT contract after the pop us ends. Hopefully, with our partners.

Potential ROI for a Brand Partner…

Content and Brand Storytelling

We believe Home Kitchen will deliver powerful content, for branded programming and storytelling across all your channels

Rich strands of storytelling can emerge from;

The individual backstories and diversity of life experiences of the people we employ
The impact the initiative will make to mental health, future employability and social inclusion of those we are able to help and our partner’s role in facilitating this.

The content can be maximised in compelling ways:

Internal employee engagement content
External AV assets to communicate your values and purpose across all your channels from paid and organic social media to TV advertising and all points in between
As case studies to communicate active commitment to your CSR/ESG and D&I protocols

PR / Media

A dedicated press call and comms campaign built around your partnership with us

Data and Social Impact

Possibility to brand, contribute to and circulate an impact report detailing the success of our partnership initiatives

Behaviour change – Improvements to mental health/wellbeing
Reductions to the amount of negative thoughts
Ensuring the improved employability/social inclusion of those we help
Positive media coverage

PR, Media, Experiential

Included in the press call and comms campaign to launch Home Kitchen

We will work with your PR team to hone key messages for all external communications.

Invites to opening night
Rights to interview or ‘cooking with…’ lesson with our 2 Star Michelin chef in any medium and disseminate content to all media
Rights to sponsor one of our recruits through the program and create bespoke content around that individual
Rights to host ‘cooking with…’ masterclasses at Home Kitchen
Rights to host dedicated ‘customers only’ night at Home Kitchen – inc discount dishes for proven customers for the duration of project

Branding

Featured in our partner branded area inside our venue (or total naming rights if our exclusive partner)

Included in all messaging for our press call and social campaign
Branded – table talkers on all tables in our venue
A partner section on our menu
‘Dish of the Day’– sponsored by

Why is Home Kitchen Important?

80% of homeless people have reported some form of poor mental health experience and over 45% have actually been diagnosed. These stats are from Homeless Hub – similar figures are reported by Shelter and Crisis. Meanwhile, having a sense of purpose provided by meaningful work has been shown to radically improve mental health wellbeing.

Home Kitchen can help with that!

It is also acknowledged that work is a pathway out of homelessness – a way to reclaim people from a potential life on the streets.

Home Kitchen can help with this too!

Just as Importantly…

The UK hospitality, catering and food sectors currently have the highest level of vacancies – the sectors are in crisis according to some news reports.

The Office of National Statistics verifies this data -the Hospitality sector posted record number of vacancies last year and struggled to fill them.

Meanwhile, there are 274,000 homeless people in the UK (Source: Shelter, Dec 2021).

And yet…

The majority of employers, despite huge claims around inclusivity, are unwilling to employ homeless people. Stereotypes skew the picture!

42% of bosses would sack existing staff if they became homeless!

It’s time to change the way we think….

Why Not Join Us?

We realise we can’t help everyone but we feel it’s time to change the common perception of homeless people. Home Kitchen could become one successful case study to help change those perceptions; to encourage others to get behind this community and help to lift them out of poverty.

Why wouldn't you join us? This is an opportunity to:

Effectively showcase your values, mission and purpose
Demonstrate your commitments to genuine diversity, inclusivity, wellbeing and community
Create compelling and meaningful brand storytelling to amplify across all your channels
Develop relationships with new customer groups while delivering social impact

Home Kitchen