Spotlight: The Community Kitchen at Leaside United Church

Community Kitchen Volunteers

The Community Kitchen at Leaside United Church began its eleventh year on Wednesday October 17, 2018. We are a dedicated group of people, some from our congregation and others from the Independent Studies program at Frontier College. Frontier College is a Canada-wide, volunteer-based literacy organization which teaches adults to read and write and nurtures an environment favourable to lifelong learning. Some of our members are currently studying at Frontier College while others are graduates.

The Community Kitchen meets once a month, October through May, to prepare and share a delicious and nutritious dinner. Every get-together has a literacy component in which we study something specific about food or its preparation or about eating healthy meals at a reasonable cost. We have grown since our beginning and are now 20 in number. Everyone agrees that we must keep what we are learning in mind as we shop for and prepare tasty and healthy meals at home.

Many wonderful traditions have developed throughout the years including our Holiday Party in December and our end-of-the-year dinner in May.  These  are the only celebrations some members of our group have and we always try to make them as special as possible. We also celebrate birthdays and other milestones.

Each year has a special theme. 2017/18 was the Year of International Food. Each month we focused on a country chosen through discussion by the group. We also did puzzles and played games, we prayed and sang, we shared significant events in our lives and grew ever closer as a community.

This is the Year of Wellness.

“Every community has a choice to be one of two things. It can choose to be a bag of marbles, single units that don’t affect each other except in collision. Or it can choose to be a bag of grapes. The juices begin to mingle and there is no way to extricate yourself. Each is part of all. Part of the fragrance. Part of the stuff.”

The Community Kitchen at Leaside United Church continues as a bag of grapes.