Recipes of HOPE
“Our purpose was simple: to meet people face to face. To hold hands, share recipes and eat together.
To use food to create a sense of welcome, peace and belonging.
To celebrate our shared humanity with new friends, creating nourishment for the belly, the heart and the soul.””
Greece, 2018
Where it all began
“Just go and do what you can”,
The words spoken by Shernaz, a local shopkeeper and member of the Faversham and Whitstable Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
In the winter of 2015, Hannah, Christine and Emma packed blankets, warm coats, apples and fresh bread into Emma’s van and boarded the ferry from Folkestone to Calais. They expected to spend a few days volunteering.
Instead, one journey has become a decade long mission.
In the makeshift Ashram Kitchen they prepared meals alongside volunteers from around the world. It was there they first met Bagzad from Kurdistan and Omar, a young poet from South Sudan.
France, 2015 - Emily Parish (Rendah Films)
In the Jungle Books Library, Omar shared a poem called Refugee in the Jungle.
With his permission, Emma carried his words back to the UK, hoping they might help others understand the reality of forced displacement through the voice of someone who had lived it.
Months later, at one o'clock in the morning, Emma received a call.
Omar had crossed the Channel and was in London.
Their friendship continued over bowls of Ful Medamas, warm bread, fresh salad and oranges shared around a kitchen table in Stockton, North of England.
That first meal was the beginning of something much bigger; a mission to protect and preserve our shared humanity.
United Kingdom, 2017
Around the table
As friendships grew, food became much more than something to eat.
Preparing meals together led to conversations, an exchange of music, poetry, dancing; of celebration and collective action.
Together, people from many countries discovered that around a shared table, strangers can quickly became friends.
The Happiness All Around Collective - Omar’s name for the group - was united by a simple belief:
“Together our voices are stronger”.
United Kingdom, 2016
Soon afterwards, the collective was gifted a 1956 army catering tent.
Once designed to feed soldiers in times of conflict, it was transformed into The Welcome Tent — a roaming community kitchen using food, storytelling and hospitality to build understanding across cultures.
The first event took place at the Hythe Food Festival in East Kent in 2016.
Nobody expected it to be so successful.
Local people, businesses, volunteers and refugee families cooked, laughed and shared stories together. Food dissolved barriers that politics was trying to enforce.
United Kingdom, 2017
It was the beginning of an extraordinary journey.
Over the following years, The Welcome Tent travelled more than 16,000 miles across Europe—from Calais to Greece—collecting recipes, friendships and stories that would eventually become Recipes of HOPE.
In 2019, the humanKINDER team was awarded a global design prize for Recipes of HOPE, from the European Academy of Design and Design Indaba.
This page is an invitation to join our growing table.
Exchanging bread for jewellery with residents of Utopia,
Healing with real remedies, hot baths & chicken broth,
Eating like Kings and Queens out of supermarket bins,
Crying with the descendants of Auschwitz survivors,
Sharing poetry with survivors of child trafficking,
Planting seeds with Syrian Revolutionaries,
Catwalking with Anarchists in Exarcheia,
Discovering what it truly means to live,
When you are no longer afraid to die.
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