Open Collective
Open Collective
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A community together
Published on January 31, 2021 by Aym


It’s been an incredible start to the year, and we have so many hopes, ideas and energy for our asylum seeking migrant friends thanks to the amazing community support in Reading. When people say “charity starts at home”, why are migrants considered any less a part of our community than anyone else? 







Food is a human right


After celebrating Eritrean Christmas in January, we’re slowly starting to prepare for Ramadan in April. Still, each night we serve 40 hot meals, and we could always do with more budding cooks and restaurants to help us (feel free to ask your local take-away if they’d ever be keen on donating meals, Yaadgaar on Oxford Road have sent us 40 meals every Monday since we started last May). If you think you could whip up 20 meals, give us a message on Facebook - we can help with recipes, ingredients, delivery, and a massive pot! 


If you have excess in-date tinned goods, lentils, pulses, rice, pasta and more - consider dropping it off to us so we can supply local cooks with lovely ingredients. If you have a lot of fresh meat, fish or veg, you can still message us on Facebook or Instagram and we’ll try and hook a cook up. 


We’re also working with Calais Food Collective who are supporting asylum seekers stuck in the horrendous conditions of Calais. The police confiscate, break and ruin the basic items they need to cook - so if you have any pots, pans, teapots or cooking utensils (no knives), message us on Facebook to drop them off one evening. We’re collecting between 1 to 15 Feb.



The work is never done


As a solidarity collective, all of us have full time jobs, families, children, responsibilities that we juggle alongside keeping this kitchen going. We do not have paid positions. Your support is genuinely amazing and critical. You can actually see where every single penny goes when you donate to us - it’s always directly for the needs of our friends. So we appreciate your solidarity and encourage everyone to look beyond the goodwill we’ve shown, and hold our government and their ‘hostile’ environment to account, hold the many who are profiting from brutal wars to account, to end this racist rhetoric of the ‘migrant other’ and to look at dismantling the social and political constructs that let these people be treated as anything other than human.