Meet the Volunteers Who Run Our Community Kitchens

Six kitchens, four hundred volunteers, eleven thousand meals a month. None of it works without the people who show up at six in the morning to peel vegetables.

Penny has run the Tuesday shift for nine years. She keeps a notebook of who has not come in for a while, and she phones them. More than one person has told us that call was the reason they came back.

Rodney arrived as a guest, eating with us through a bad winter. He now manages the goods-in door and knows every supplier by name and every delivery driver by their coffee order.

What surprises new volunteers is how little cooking experience matters. Reliability matters. Turning up on the same day every week, so the person expecting a hot meal gets one, matters enormously.

If you have three hours a week, we can use them. The application takes five minutes and our coordinator reads every one.