Welcome
Giving back starts with you!
Our Mission is to help those in Need.
To improve the quality of life for many, to help reduce hunger and poverty,
Challenge for Lebanon
Lebanon is facing extreme hardships. Food, Medicine, Housing and Education are becoming luxuries. Lebanese citizens are in need of your support. We are setting a Challenge for a minimum of 1,000 Lebanese to donate $10 per month on recurring basis to help us deliver basics needs of our most vulernable citizens. Please post this challenge like and share on all social media accounts.
Commnuity Incubator Kitchen
Strengthening Our Community through innovation and community outreach
The Community Kitchen Incubator will provide tools to help youth and adults who are disadvantaged, unemployed or underemployed to develop skills that move them toward economic self- sufficiency.
Community Kitchen Incubator will reduce hunger and increase the availability of healthy local food by allowing entrepreneurs, farmers and organizations serving the hungry a place in which to process food, unsold fresh vegetables and fruits, excess produce that would normally end up in the landfill or compost pile.
The Community Kitchen Incubator (CKI) project is a social enterprise formed to support small and start-up food entrepreneurs, provide a facility for custom processing of value-added products for small farmers, and provide processing. The goal is to increase the availability of local, healthy, and affordable food products and food-related employment in Saratoga Springs area and adjacent counties. This Food Business Incubator will offer 5 commercial kitchen spaces for hourly rental, to enable a wide variety of food businesses to start and grow. In addition to the kitchens, there will be on-site business planning & development classes, plus financing assistance. The Community Kitchen Incubator will focus on food cost and sourcing, website development, logo, marketing, packaging, bookkeeping, tax advice, app services such as door dash, grub hub, uber eats etc. all of which will help to ensure the food entrepreneur success.
Those food entrepreneurs seeking to start and grow a business will be encouraged to have or develop a business plan which the incubator will help in the process, and to create a plan to graduate from the Community Kitchen Incubator into their own independent facility. Other users will be long-term renters, with no plans to move out of the Community Kitchen Incubator facility, operating part-time or small food businesses.
The users of these kitchens will be diverse; with many being low-to-moderate income individuals who are seeking to either supplement their incomes, become economically self- sufficient, or to grow an already-existing small food business. Much of the early community interest has been by inner city men and women who wish to sell traditional foods to raise money for themselves or community projects. Other users wish to explore the development of a particular food product to see whether it has the potential to become the start of a new food business. All of them see the opportunity for increased income and new jobs for themselves and members of their communities.
Committed users include:
1. Caterers, food cart vendors, food truck operators, food product developers, food business start-ups, and culinary students at Local Colleges seeking to develop food businesses during and after graduation.
2. A food service training program and wholesale production business for returning prisoners and teenage children of incarcerated adults, unemployed and underemployed youth, and adults.
3. The Farm to Table healthy snack program for school children in the the local area.
4. We will also research small farmer co-packing service to process excess produce and from farmers and turn it into processed and value-added products that will be sold to farmers’ wholesale and retail customers, increasing small farmers’ incomes and opportunities.
5. One large kitchen will be designed for use by both training programs and cooking classes, community cooking projects, food-related fundraising events, and food processing demonstrations for local communities.
Help Our Cause
Your support and contributions will enable us to meet our goals and improve conditions. Your generous donation will fund our mission. Gestures from the Heart LTD
