Our Community Partners
Turl Street Kitchen teams up with a number of community groups and projects that are working towards building a more sustainable, ethical and participatory food future for Oxford and beyond. There are always opportunities for our staff and customers to volunteer with our community partners - just drop Doireann an email on doireann@turlstreetkitchen.co.uk and she'll link you up with the right people.
OxGrow is Oxford's Edible Community Garden. OxGrow is open to everyone – it’s for kids and adults of all ages to learn to grow food together. It’s an exciting, creative edible laboratory where we’re experimenting with organic, climate-friendly growing techniques, and harnessing local knowledge to dabble with produce you’ll never find in the shops. OxGrow is one of Oxford Hub's Community Volunteering projects, linking up students with the wider community, and also a member of the Community Action Group network.
Oxford Food Bank is a fantastic local charity working to eradicate food waste and food poverty in Oxford. Volunteers collect good quality fresh food from local supermarkets and wholesalers that would otherwise go to waste, and redistribute it to charities throughout Oxford. Thousands of free meals are served every week to people who would struggle to put food on their plates without this service. This also helps to cut Oxford's carbon footprint, since food sent to landfill emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Student volunteers are supplied by Oxford Hub's project Food Justice.
DinnerTime is Oxford's new Community Kitchen which has just been launched by Oxford Hub and the folks from the CAG network. DinnerTime is a celebration of food, family and friends - a way to reclaim mealtimes in your community. People turn up on a Sunday afternoon, cook together, share cookery tips and then relax over a delicious feast. All the food used is food that would otherwise have gone to waste. We run regular DinnerTimes upstairs in Turl Street, and they're starting to crop up elsewhere around the county too!
Cultivate is Oxford's new local food co-op, and we're thrilled to be partnering with them in a number of ways. We'll keep you posted as to what this partnership will look like as things develop. We suspect it might be very exciting...
Just Change is our newest community partner, supplier of our delicious new house tea. Just Change are pioneering a revolutionary alternative trading system that directly links local communities in India and the UK, enabling them to control the terms on which they trade and the way profits are distributed. It challenges the injustices of the global market and helps communities to build a new economy based on principles of justice and co-operation. TSK's own community projects benefit from this new partnership too - we've promised Just Change that a portion of the profits made on every cup of tea will be donated to our own community food projects. The result will be happy tea-growers in India, happy tea-distributors in Luton, happy community projects in Oxford and, of course, happy tea-drinkers in TSK. A win-win-win-win-win situation, we think!
