Feeding Communities and The Thomas Franks Foundation are pleased to be supporting Only A Pavement Away’s new initiative, Hospitality Against Homelessness. Only A Pavement Away is a charity set up to help those living on the streets find employment in the hospitality industry. During the Covid-19 crisis many hospitality workers are newly homeless or have found themselves in food poverty.

Thomas Franks is supporting the project by donating 2000 meals this week, as well as 25 microwaves to reheat the meals. These microwaves have been kindly donated by our client Kenwood and Curry’s. This ensures that those who have been placed into hostels have some form of cooking facilities available to them. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, and its subsequent effect on the hospitality industry, it’s more important than ever that the industry itself, and the people in it are supported.

On Sunday, Frank Bothwell and a team of volunteers delivered two van’s of ingredients and 4 tonnes of products, donated by Dudmans of Berkshire and En-Routes MD, Hamish Cook, to the Yummy kitchen hub, to help them continue cooking for the vulnerable.

One thousand freshly cooked, nutritious chilled meals, including chicken katsu and vegetable Keralan curry, was then delivered to locations across London on Wednesday, followed by another one thousand meals on Friday, to areas like Trafalgar Square. Thomas Franks has received help by Callum Ilott, British Racing Drive and Heather Fisher, England Rugby Sevens star, on delivering the food aid.

Founder of The Thomas Franks Foundation, Frank Bothwell​, is delighted to support the Only A Pavement Away project, saying: ‘Our charity was established to provide relief for the disadvantaged, so teaming up with OAPA has enabled us to deliver quality food supplies to the OAPA kitchen hub and to ensure that freshly-cooked, nutritious meals go directly to those most in need.’

To help raise funds for the project, Michelin starred Chef, Tom Aikens has teamed up with hospitality charity Only A Pavement Away to launch its new initiative – the ‘Tom Aikens Charity Cooking Challenge’. The initiative will invite participants to cook a meal in five minutes, donate £5 to the Hospitality Against Homelessness project and nominate five friends to get involved.

Food poverty does not stop with the end of the lockdown period and neither does Feeding Communities. We have developed initiative that allow us to keep Feeding Communities going so we can help as many people as possible. We are currently piloting a new initiative in schools to get students involved in helping their local communities.

You can stay up to date on what we are up to through this page or through our social media pages.