social enterprise projects

The People’s Oven is a project allowing open access to our kitchen space and ovens.

Based off of the idea of medieval communal oven, we began autumn 2022 to welcome local people into our space to bulk prepare their meals.

It was a project that we pushed forward ahead of funding to meet the needs and apparent lack of support generated by the Cost of Living and Fuel Hike Crises. It gave the opportunity to local people to use our space and commercial equipment under supervision to bulk prepare meals, try new foods & recipes and stay warm.

During these sessions we would also run a small zero-waste cookery demonstration based off of a donated ingredient to inspire attendees to re-examine what constitutes at food-waste and how to stretch limited resources.

Timeline:

We self-funded and ran The People’s Oven Oct 2022 - Jun 2023.

We hope to hold sessions again in winter 2023, however, we are now dependent on grant funding to be able to run this project.

The People’s Plate was a move to introduce a more affordable meal into our offering during the peak of the cost of living crisis.

Like a lot of other businesses, we were forced to put our prices up which although was largely accepted by our local customers also could be seen exclude others.

For the People’s Oven we often were donated fresh produce or goods by our suppliers or other local social projects. The surplus of which, combined with our own kitchen’s diverted waste, was used to create a pay-what-you-can two-course lunch which offered three suggested sales prices depending on the customers personal circumstance.

Timeline:

It was a project we ran on Tuesday Jan 2023 - May 2023, unfortunately it was not financially sustainable for us but it is a theme we are looking to revisit and incorporate into our daily offering.

Traineeships have been part of the core planning at Hearth since before we launched.

It will be a practical and tangible outlet of our social enterprise’s core aims.

Every 6 months we will be taking on a young unemployed person into a paid trainee position.

We will give them an introduction to all the practical working elements of hospitality and a chance to gain valuable work experience both within our kitchen and front of house.

They will be taught a foundational understanding of sustainable food and farming practises and more environmentally-friendly kitchen management.

Alongside this they will be supported to gain a mental health first aider certificate, to better equip them in future roles and when managing their own health.

The outcome is two-fold, both addressing the needs of our local area where youth unemployment is statically high and the needs of our industry, where we are seeing a large staff shortage and examining some of the larger sources that could’ve caused this.

Timeline:

Launch date: TBC, Q2 2024

In collaboration with our local circular economy group, ReRoute, we will be taking on a space within a new studios in Hackney Wick.

Working alongside our fellow peers who actively engage in circular economy practises within their business.

We will be operating the new cafe in their public facing community space.

The move will enable us to further our own circular practises within our kitchen and will give us the benefit of a more naturally occurring footfall.

The benefit of which will be an increased revenue, allowing us to feed more funds into our community workshops.

Launch Date: TBC, early 2024

We keep aside 10% of paid or ticketed events to offer a pay-what-you-can place for local people.

This will be advertised on our event’s ticket page and is at the attendees discretion to reach out and ask us for a place to be assigned to us.

This is funded by including the relevant costs into the paid tickets.

Timeline:

Indefinite