Giraffe Community Kitchen

Aim

To help local people in Perth and Kinross to reduce food waste, learn new skills and move away from food and financial insecurity

Known locally as Giraffe, due to our social enterprise cafe in Perth, we support people over the age of 16 from all over Perth and Kinross and beyond.

Our primary aim is to help people with severe and complex barriers, such as learning disabilities, autism and mental ill health, to make the transition towards inclusion, socialisation and, if appropriate, into meaningful work.

We achieve this by providing relevant supported work experience, vocational skills and personal development. We focus on overlooked aspects, such as confidence building, which enables our trainees to move their lives forward as well as being an active and included part in our local communities.

Our trainees support us make and deliver outside catering across Perth and Kinross and to run our busy cafe.  Been to Perth Theatre and Concert Hall recently?  That tasty food you ate was made by our skilled team of staff and trainees!

As well as this, since  April 2020, our trainees, volunteers and staff team have made and distributed more than 80,000 free meals and meal kits for free to local people in need.  As a result of all this activity, we (gratefully) received funding from a number of sources to build a large community kitchen in Perth to allow us to:-

• work with even more trainees
• make even more tasty food
• support more people in our local community who are struggling

If successful, funding from the Aviva Community Fund will allow us to continue our work in the Community Kitchen, cover the costs of food and packaging for the meals we distribute and sustain activity for our awesome trainees.

The core of the social impact aspect of this project is entirely based on collaborative work across the whole of Perth and Kinross. We have supplied to many households and groups around Perth and Kinross through other community groups such as:- Caledonia Housing (elderly sheltered housing estates), Perth Autism Support, Perthshire ADHD Support, TullochNet, Broke Not Broken, Blue Door Foodbank, Letham4all and Churches Action for The Homeless. 

Overall, there are two main groups within our community who will benefit from this project:- 

1) Those locally in need (through financial insecurity, hidden poverty, homelessness and/or disadvantage) and; 

2) Our trainee group (of individuals suffering from mental ill health, with learning disorders, Autism and Down’s syndrome).

Please support this project which is making a real difference to thousands of people across Perth and Kinross!!

This project successfully funded on 12th July 2023