Meet Her Kitchen Table, the social enterprise delivering meals from around the world
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Over the years, the culinary scene in Canberra has seen fusion restaurants, cafés and food vans popping up across the city, offering us a variety of dishes from different parts of the world.
But with lockdowns, restrictions, and an increase in COVID cases, it’s been a difficult time for Canberra’s hospitality scene.
However, if you love good food and supporting a social cause, meet Her Kitchen Table, a meal delivery service offering home-cooked meals from across the globe, from Bangladesh to Palestine to Fiji to Afghanistan and many more. All dishes are cooked by migrant and refugee women in Canberra with the aim to empower and help them create their own opportunities.
Meal artists at work.
What is Her Kitchen Table?
Having officially launched in November 2021, Her Kitchen Table is a Canberra-based social enterprise which aims to empower Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women across the territory through promoting financial independence, harnessing social inclusion, building a network of resources, and promoting diversity. I spoke with Nazia Ahmed, one of the co-founders of Her Kitchen Table, to find out more about this exciting new venture and what it means for Canberrans.
In her ‘day job,’ Nazia is the Managing Director of The Social Outcomes Lab (SOULAB), where she and her team use evidence to identify issues and come up with possible solutions.
“The problem that we were trying to solve was the one of how we can improve economic empowerment of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Women in the ACT,” explains Nazia.
Through running a number of workshops in 2018 and 2019, Nazia and her team learnt the key issues faced by CALD women were discrimination, lack of networks, language and lack of recognition of qualifications.
“We wanted to see what we could do to remove these barriers—and after a lot of brainstorming, came up with the Her Kitchen Table concept. Our thinking was that many women from CALD backgrounds were naturally great cooks so why not leverage this strength in order to tackle the remaining barriers.”
The idea is simple—through Her Kitchen Table, the home cooks (known as Meal Artists) are not only able to sell their food through the Her Kitchen Table online platform, but they also receive training and supervision from a qualified chef, as well as business training, access to various supporting networks and wrap around supports for anyone who needs it. All the food preparation and cooking by the Meal Artists are done in a commercial kitchen.
Nazia tells me her inspiration for Her Kitchen Table comes from her own migrant experience.
“I’m a second-generation Bangladeshi-Australian and arrived here when I was ten years old from the Middle East. My mum didn’t speak much English and I saw how much she persevered to learn and obtain skills to become a pre-school educator. The migrant struggle is real,” Nazia tells me.
Nazia Ahmed
Through looking at her own mother’s experience of moving to a foreign country, learning the language, finding work, and raising a young family in a new environment, Nazia wondered how her own mother’s experience could have been made so much better.
“Imagine a situation where she would make friends, get paid to do what she loves (cooking), learn English and a whole bunch of other skills along the way—it would have been pretty amazing! So in a way, Her Kitchen Table is very personal for me, it’s my way of giving back to the migrants and refugees of today so that their road doesn’t have to be as hard. We are already seeing positive outcomes and that feels pretty amazing.”
Though it’s a simple yet amazingly empowering and effective concept, establishing Her Kitchen Table wasn’t an easy job.
“Setting up a social enterprise with limited funds has many challenges. There are a number of moving parts including recruiting and engaging the meal artists, the online platform, the training, customer acquisition, marketing, and securing a commercial kitchen during COVID,” says Nazia.
On top of the challenges of establishing Her Kitchen Table and managing her consulting business, Nazia tells me one her biggest challenges was during the two years her father spent in hospital with a brain injury and having him recently pass away.
“I had many team meetings in the hospital café. My dad was a major driver for me to keep going because I knew how much he would love Her Kitchen Table,” she says.
“The only easy part was getting other partners on board—so many amazing organisations and individuals got behind us to offer support. While we had some funding available, we had two key partners come on board very generously and provide pro-bono services”
Nazia also tells me this is all possible because of the “partners and the very amazing SOULAB team who are all brilliant, passionate people.”
How can Canberrans support Her Kitchen Table?
There are a number of ways you can support Her Kitchen Table, whether it be by ordering food, signing up to be a funding partner, or becoming a Meal Artist.
Food orders can be made through the Her Kitchen Table website, where you can see the different cuisines on offer and learn about each of the Meal Artists and their stories.
Additionally, if you’re a business that wants to get involved as a corporate partner to help with funding and implementation, get in touch with Her Kitchen Table to see how this social enterprise can help with your corporate social responsibilities.
Her Kitchen Table also does corporate caterings, and recently catered a wedding.
“Please order, give us your feedback and help spread the word!” says Nazia.
