The Gratitude Community Kitchen

Showing our gratitude for support received by our kind friends and commercial partners to build the Gratitude Community Kitchen

Gratitude began as a community kitchen in 2013, with the primary aim to fight hunger and it was our pleasure to use food otherwise going to waste to feed our community with nutritious meals.
Unfortunately, during the pandemic our focus changed but we always dreamed of returning to the hussle and bustle of a fully functioning community kitchen.

During the best part of 2022, we have spent time redeveloping part of the hub into our community kitchen and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the following friends and commercial partners for their ongoing support, advice and much needed funds.

No project is successful without good leadership and we would like to thank the following for heading up and supporting our ambitious plans:

John Carlisle: for managing the project from the early stages all the way through to fruition.

Sarit Cohen: for help in the early stages of design and planning

Matthew for his wonderful help clearing the kitchen in preparation of the building work and for helping with the grant application.

Zee for ongoing support with designs & advice.

We were very grateful to receive donations from the following councillors who used their ward improvement budgets towards our kitchen’s development costs.

Cllr Alan Plancy
Cllr Suzan Brown
Cllr Rebecca Chalice
Cllr Dan Ozarow
Cllr Glen Briski

We received generous financial donations towards labour and materials from the following friends of Gratitude:
Inciya, a very kind lady who raised a £1,000 donation from her family towards the kitchen
Maitri Foundation, to cover the cost of tilers.

Locker Foundation, for donations towards the purchase of the commercial cookers.

Barnet Food Hub, for donating the ovens

We were fortunate to receive generous donations of building materials from the following local businesses:

Goss Environmental Cladding St. Albans: for cladding and materials
Trovex for cladding
Wickes Borehamwood: for building materials.
Topps Tiles Borehamwood: for tiles and tiling materials
Selco Kingsbury for donating materials.

We were privileged to receive services from the following commercial partners:

Ampsilli AV: for the electrical work.

The following people used their amazing skills towards developing the kitchen:
Grant Sugarman (GP Developers Ltd) Who helped us from the start, and donated his tiling team to volunteer a full day of tiling.

Steve carpenter – putting up shelving
Dudu and Lorenzo – for cladding installation
Lorenzo – for plumbing & building
Yitzik Shalom, Danny Perez & David Zarnaby – for work on the door, stud walls & flooring.

The following donations of kitchen equipment were gratefully received:

Islington Foodbank for donating pots & trays.

We were delighted to host the Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire for the grand opening of the community kitchen on Tuesday 25th October and would like to take this opportunity to thank all the wonderful army of volunteers who made this wondrous miracle together. We look forward to reaping the fruits of our labour in supporting our community with hot nutritious meals.