As Kinship Hub grows over time, and in response to the needs of our kinship carers, we’ve become more than just the Kinship Carers Cooking Club that we were when we started.
Our trading arm, Kinship Kitchen which was launched as a way to raise funds to support the Kinship Hub’s programs, has now expanded to now include more than just our fermentation workshops and online cooking classes. Kinship Kitchen also now offers pop-up themed meal restaurant nights, and partnerships with two local South London businesses- Coffeenlove coffee shop and Hither Green Taproom, where we’ve joined together with these great local businesses to provide our food for sale in their establishments. We hope to not only continue to grow these partnerships, but to also establish more partnerships with other local businesses, and to launch a corporate catering service with meeting, business lunch and event catering offers.
Kinship Hub has responded to the support needs of our carers to also offer informational and educational webinars where professionals give talks on a range of relevant topics such as managing contact safely, promoting a positive sense of identity in the children they care for, completing life story work, building resilience, and natural black and dual heritage hair care workshops.
As the strict covid-19 restrictions started to lift, we started planning meet-ups so that our carers and their children could meet together in person to socialize and make friends with others experiencing kinship care. In addition to the in person Kinship Carers Cooking Club session, it’s important for the community to have a chance to get together, the aim of these meet-ups is to help both the adults and the children feel less isolated, offer each other support, and share their experiences and information with each other.
In our newest program that launched in February 2022, we offer training and mentorship to kinship carers to assist them to enter or return to work via our employability program. The employability program offers opportunities to upskill kinship carers with food safety and catering training with the view to offering them employment within the Kinship Kitchen catering business. The launch of the employability program has fulfilled a long-term goal of ours to be able to offer employment opportunities to members of our Hub.
We are excited about the continued growth of Kinship Hub, and in the future we see a scope for developing more forms of practical and emotional support to kinship families. Kinship carers should not be penalized for doing the right thing and stepping in to care for vulnerable children within their networks, and they deserve more support. We plan on continuing to do all we can to meet as many of these support needs as possible.
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