Community Kitchen Toolkit

There are many types of community kitchens or collective kitchens, where people volunteer their time to cook together as a community. One of the differences is who the meals go to. In a collective kitchen, people get together to prep and cook and then share the finished meals amongst the group. The JHC Community Kitchen was created to make meals for anyone that needed them, including volunteers. We froze the meals each week and then distributed them to people in the community and to partner organizations that serve people experiencing food insecurity.

The JHC Community Kitchen was created as a way to address systemic food insecurity in amiskwaciwâskahikan (aka Edmonton). We have found that access to nutritious food has been pushed to the margins for many people in our communities.

Due to tremendous community support, we were able to add to the incredible work being done to feed the growing number of people for whom nutritious food is unattainable.

We saw this opportunity to bring people out of their homes into a safe community kitchen space and leverage their cooking skills to make beautiful meals each week for whoever needed them.

The kitchen served as a way to help strengthen mental health in these isolating pandemic times. Volunteers came together to chop, chat and make food with love using beautiful ingredients. It is an incredible feeling to be able to connect with someone and give them a meal that has been made by the collective hands of the community. We focused on the dignity and health of each of the 200 people we cooked for each week.

We are committed to helping support and strengthen local food communities across the city that increase access to food without barriers. This toolkit was created as a way to help people that want to come together to create food hubs in their communities. We are based in Alberta in Treaty 6 territory, but this toolkit is designed to be adapted to any region in Canada.