Help "Your Kind Kitchen" Get A Kitchen
Hello There!
Crystal and Jacqueline met when they were both working as direct-service professionals for folks with developmental disabilities. They were fast friends, and started a cooking group together where they showed the souls they served how to make home-cooked meals.
That cooking group is where Crystal and Jacqueline cemented a love of cooking & working together, bonded over shared environmentalist zeal, and somehow missed that all the organic meats and cheeses they used had a much larger impact than the single-use plastic and petroleum emissions they were focused on.
Though both these ladies would have told you they LOVED animal products and couldn’t live without them, they started learning how those foods were terrible for the earth, our humanity's collective health, and the animals needlessly/cruelly raised to feed us all disease.
If you (like we) find yourselves thinking the above sounds absurd (because we’re so culturally drenched in unhealthy foods that pointing out their harm promptly raises hackles), here are some major organizations also promoting the health benefits of plant-based diets: National Institutes of Health, Mayo Clinic, Yale, the United Nations, Harvard School of Health, American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, even the National Kidney Foundation.
Crystal and J didn’t have the apathetic capacity to ignore all the above knowledge, so they took their love of cooking and started shifting plant-based.
To their surprise and delight, that dietary shift propelled them into the best health of their lives and radiated out to the loved ones who made the same switch… and all the while every plant-based feaster was lowering their environmental footprint and saving a soul from suffering. What started with our families, branched out to all the big-group/party/event cooking we were both accustomed to, and (not shockingly if we've cooked for you) the new-and-improved food was loved by all.
That example (and a lot of klaxon howling) swayed an ever-growing swell of souls to reach out to us and say that they would love to eat/do better but didn’t have the time/know-how/desire/etc to do it themselves, and eventually enough folks requested for us to “do it for them” that we decided to step out of our comfort zones and launch Your Kind Kitchen (<--a completely zero-waste plant-based fully-prepped meal delivery service), but so many souls signed up we immediately outgrew the church kitchen we were renting for cheap.
Given that our biggest aim is to make this affordable for all involved --and the church’s inexpensive rent was a pillar in our low-cost pricing-- we are now regrouping to find a better space for this operation. It is imperative to us that we make this service as affordable as possible, because we want to serve the whole of our community: not just those with disposable income.
The caveat is that we require a commercial kitchen with the storage capacity and open-space available to handle all the zero-waste containers and coolers; and to lease one of the many closed-due-to-COVID restaurants around Onondaga would push us out of the pricing bracket we are desperate to keep in tack.
Our hope is to raise enough money to rehabilitate the spacious old South Onondaga General Store located on J’s property and hire on an extra set of hands for cooking/delivering. We’d be able to have a rent-free space that would keep our prices low, we could build it to suit our needs (<—SINGLE STORY, higher counters, dishwasher, actual commercial electricity, etc), and our long-running dream has been to get that building up and running as a Community Center (<--**sustainability talks**, cooking demos/lessons, movie nights, art shows, open mics, the ability for folks to rent it out as-needed, etc). The building would radiate growth here in South O & the rest of Onondaga County (<—and our eventual increased delivery range <—Looking at you Oswego County!)
On that backburner (yet just as important), keeping the business on J’s property is best for the kindergarten cub in her care, and her tangential 5-years-and-counting dream of having a second-child could be folded into this adventure and not sidelined by community-oriented environmental dreams paired with driving back and forth across the county. :-)
Why not use one of the rentable/shareable kitchens (like the amazing/community-bettering With Love)? Because there are over 600 zero-waste containers just for the base (**not even wait-list**) amount of current subscribers...and that's just ONE WEEK'S worth! (And that's not even including all our gear and the coolers involved.) That part about "storage capacity and open-space available to handle all the zero-waste containers" is essential, because we learned with the church rental that bringing-in-and-taking-out each time is a non-starter with our zero-waste system. :-)
The most important part is: the more people we can feed the more we can push back on our collective environmental footprints, and the healthier and more sustainable our community will be. It’s a win-win-win all around...we just need the space to start.
Are you one of the souls who’s been asking how to help? Are you looking for a way to help humanity toward better health and sustainability? Well here’s your chance. :-)
The outside of the General Store
What it looked like a few years ago when we first started cleaning it up.
What it looks like now.
"Princess Bride" with friends a few summers ago.
Crystal's thoughts on all the above. I think she said it perfectly and with all the heart and passion we both mirror. Crystal doesn't dream the above lightly: she lived it and is still living it.
Working as Direct Service Professions (which Crystal still is) you don't come home with swollen salaries. You live paycheck-to-paycheck and you do it because you know those folks need care, and your heart is big enough to look past riches toward the work that needs to be done. Crystal is also a single-mother of three teenagers ($$$) and she had a feast of health issues that came with the corresponding swell of prescriptions. She shifted plant-based, she felt increasingly better (physically, mentally, emotionally), she (and some of her children) were able to get off a bulk of their meds, they all have more energy than ever, and they are now Doing more than ever...all while lowering their environmental impact and bettering their health.
We know (because all of agencies listed above, and our leading scientists and doctors, and big names like the United Nations) that humanity is being urged to transition as plant-based as possible for best health and environmental sustainability.
What's holding our community back? Lack of time to keep abreast of the latest research, schedules too busy for sorting out better alternatives, and most folks no longer have the time/desire to cook every night (and take-out is severely limited and PRICEY for plant-based whole-foods).
What's holding us back from helping out? Coming from the DSP realms we aren't ladies flush with funds and don't come from families with money to spare. To create change within our community, we need financial support.
Help us help you and the rest of humanity. We have the skills, passion, and heart to do so... we just need a cost-effective space to work out of. <3