A social enterprise hopes to help homeless people get off the street and into careers in the restaurant industry through a new pop-up eatery in Victoria.
The Home Kitchen is crowdfunding to launch the restaurant where it will train 15 homeless people with skills to work in the industry.
Its been set up by the team behind Soup Kitchen London that feeds homeless people in central London and two time Michelin starred chef Adam Simmonds, who has worked in top restaurants including Le Gavroche and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.
Speaking to the Evening Standard about the initiative, Director Alex Brown said: “During the early days of Covid, we decided in Soup Kitchen London, that we were going to stay open. I run Soup Kitchen London on Tottenham Court Road.
“Pre-Covid, we were feeding 90 people a day. When Covid hit, everything shut down. We were one of only two organisations that were feeding people on a regular basis, so our numbers blew to 160 people a day.
“Six months in, our chef needed a break, from working 12 hours a day, five to six days a week. Adam had been to Soup Kitchen London a couple of years prior as a volunteer. I asked Adam to come down. The restaurant industry had been decimated, and he had some time on his hands to come down and cook. He had an opportunity to interact with people. He said what do you think of opening a restaurant.”
The group has been engaged in funding, working with partners such as the Beyond Food Foundation, who specialise in training people for a career in catering and hospitality, and the Zurich Community Trust, which has given £10,000 to help kickstart their crowd-funding campaign. Another £10, 000 was donated by their executive, Rob Kuchinski and his wife, Jackie, which the trust matched. They want to raise a total of £452,645 to cover wage bills, the cost of sponsoring qualifications, and food and drinks stock for the pop-up proposed to run for 13 weeks.
“We are recruiting from the homeless population from all over London, not just from the guests at our Soup Kitchen London as we recognise that it needed to go wider than that. We are working with Crisis UK, who have an employment team, and other social enterprises that specialise in funding homeless and other vulnerable people and supporting them to get a job. An organisation called Beam, do that, and we’re working with them. These are linked to all of the case workers and social workers in all of the local authorities,” said Trustee of Soup Kitchen London, Michael Brown.
The aim of the project is to help solve homelessness whilst also saving the hospitality and catering industry. Currently, there are 400,000 vacancies in restaurants in the UK, and not enough applications to fill them in.
Research by Crisis suggests there are 278, 000 homeless people in the UK, but 42% of all bosses would fire a member of staff if they became homeless. Almost all of them would not contemplate hiring a homeless person.
“We want to change perceptions,” said Michael. “We want to create a social impact report from our early day success and unlock more funding from government and civil society, so that it lasts longer than the original 13 weeks. It will continue. We intend to transform the kitchen into a franchise and open up wherever there’s a homeless problem.”
Plans for expansion have yet to be put into place but the group hopes to open up restaurants in Brighton, Bristol and Manchester, next.
The staff will be paid the London Living Wage, which is currently at £11.05, alongside National Insurance contributions, and will be given a travelcard and telephone, so they can communicate with each other.
They will be trained professionally, so that they can go on to find further work, with some of the project’s partners already offering job opportunities to the first cohort of chefs.
But whilst they do not want to exclude anyone, they recognise that customers do also need a good dining experience: “We were originally going to source recruits from Soup Kitchen London. But as we got more into it, we thought, we do really want the best 15 people, and so we’ve partnered up with different organisations, with Centrepoint, and some of these other organisations who are going to help us source people. We expect the recruitment process to be very competitive. The fact that someone is sleeping rough or homeless will not be the sole reason we hire them; however, it will be a factor that we focus on. We want to upskill and uplift people in our community and put them in a position for long-term success,” said Alex.
They hope to use this opportunity to build a case for the UK government to make it a national and permanent initiative.
Their crowd-funding page can be found here.
