Community kitchens
There are many city-affiliated community kitchens across the city in neighbourhood houses and community centres, as well as non-city affiliated kitchens in churches and in social agencies.
Publicly accessible kitchens are an important resource for:
- Supporting community education
- Social connections
- Skills and leadership training
- Community development
- Access to food
Kitchen purposes
Community kitchens are used in many ways including:
- Food skills and educational programming: Teaching and practicing food preparation, healthy eating, and preservation skills
- Meal provision and food service: Serving senior’s lunches, after school snacks, or on-site event catering
- Food rescue: Receiving large quantities of produce and processing into other foods such as soup, jams, juice, and dried veggies
- Social ventures and small businesses: Selling to farmers’ market vendors or making small scale jam and baking
- Community celebrations and gatherings: Serving neighbourhood parties and holiday celebrations
Resources
Putting your kitchen to work PDF file (2 MB)
This toolkit of resources and best practices will support community programmers to engage community members through kitchens and food-based programming.
Kitchen design guidelines PDF file (68 KB)
These guidelines can be used when renovating an existing publicly-accessible kitchen or designing a new kitchen.
Kitchen rental bulletin PDF file (587 KB)
This bulletin provides clarification on the administration of community food markets and rentals of kitchens in social service-type facilities.
The Greater Vancouver Food Bank provides support and resources to partners.
Neighbourhood Food Networks External website, opens in new tab
These networks offer food skills training.
Many offer cooking classes.