Crawley kitchen cooking for town’s homeless secures permanent home

The kitchen, in Northgate Place, will be run by the charity Giving Back Crawley, which has served some 45,000 meals to the homeless and those in temporary accommodation since the start of the pandemic.

An earlier application for the site would have seen some 50 people heading to and from the kitchen each evening to get a hot meal – but it was withdrawn after concerns were raised by neighbours.

Now the only people who go to the kitchen will be the volunteers who cook the food, which will then be delivered to meetings points in Telford Place and outside the former Moka nightclub.

Plans for the former office, which is owned by the council, have been in the pipeline for a fair while and Giving Back Crawley chair Joe Dines said they wanted to move in ‘as soon as possible’.

The charity currently feeds up to 80 people each day – all of whom are called guests.

Joe said: “What we’ve done historically is we’ve fed on the streets.

“Obviously when lockdown came that wasn’t safe for our guests or our volunteers so we just adjusted what we did very rapidly.

“We’ve been borrowing buildings from the council with kitchens in them and we started cooking straight away. We were doing breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

While no one knows for sure what the situation will be once the pandemic is nothing more than an unpleasant memory, the charity is preparing for the day its volunteers can get back out on the streets.

With generous help from Jap Performance Parts, in Stephenson Way, an 18-seater bus is being converted to allow meals to be served from the front, with space in the back for people to get on board for support, advice and basic medical checks.

Joe said: “Going forward, we will continue to feed everybody who is temporarily housed in Crawley who has no access to cooking facilities.

“If you’re in temporary accommodation, you are legally homeless and you have no access to cooking facilities – which the majority of temporary accommodation doesn’t have – then we will feed you.”

Giving Back Crawley started in 2016, becoming a charity one year later.

While unable to take on any more volunteers at the moment, anyone interested in helping out in the future can register via the website givingbackcrawley.org

A trolley for donations can also be found in Asda – with cooking supplies always welcome.

Joe said she was proud that, during the first three months of lockdown, the charity never repeated a dish.

The donations they have received have certainly made for some interesting meals. One night the guests ate bangers, mash and beans and the next it was venison stuffed peppers.

To find out more about Giving Back Crawley, either log on to givingbackcrawley.org or call Joe on 07814 171796.