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Benefit Class for Free Food Kitchen, Capetown
January 2, 2022 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
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Join me for an hour of comprehensive strengthening and subtle body awareness; a class with which to ceremoniously begin the new year. Your class donation is made directly to Free Food Kitchen.
Driven by this very real and urgent need to keep Capetown’s destitute communities from starvation, we are on a mission to provide every child, every community, every family with a daily meal, food security, and the faith that grows from knowing that tomorrow will always provide.
The Free Food Kitchens we’ll be funding (six across Capetown) are driven and led by the communities they feed and support. We use 100% of monies donated to purchase and deliver fruit and vegetables to these six communities.
Our kitchens are so much more than just places that serve food. They are spaces of nurturing and growth. A place where women leaders are enabled and supported to plan, strategize and organize themselves around the creation of feeding hubs.
The women of the community lead the charge. They organize themselves into cooking teams, design the menus around nutritious vegetarian meals, cook the meals in industrial sized pots and then serve their communities, one hot meal at a time.
These kitchens give the communities and women control, dignity and respect. A luxury in communities where abuse and hunger is commonplace.
People often ask, “How did these communities get to be so impoverished?” These communities weren’t built by choice. They were created, by force, at the hands of Apartheid’s architects.
During the 1950 and 1960s many communities of colour (ie. non-white) were forcibly removed from their homes by bulldozers and police vans, to be relocated to “Coloured, African and Indian” residential areas. Even now, you will still find racial segregation straddling economic lines in many residential areas in South Africa.
In addition to this, the Western Cape was declared a “Coloured preferential area.” This meant that African people were regarded as migrants in this province.
Many Coloured and African people were housed in municipal houses and flats, which they rented. Those who couldn’t afford the rents moved into the backyards of these houses and later vacant land, where they built basic shacks made of scarps and aluminum sheets. These backyards and informal settlements grew, alongside unemployment and a lack of basic services like running water and electricity. Today, decades later, many of the areas in these informal settlements still have no running water or electricity. And so the cycle continues.
Free Food Kitchen is harvesting more hope by embarking on a sister project called FREE FOOD GARDENS The intention is to reach and teach communities about growing their own organic food through sustainable gardening.
FREE FOOD GARDENS is a simple way for low-income communities to:
- reconnect with nature
- better understand the principles of health and nutrition
- strengthen food security
- grow into a possible source of income generation
It’s the missing link that can help build conscious communities, from the soil up.
The communities take great pride in being part of their Free Food Kitchens. The fruit and vegetables are purchased from female street vendors, helping to support and grow women’s economic empowerment at a community level.