KPC Archive
A lot has happened at KPC over the years and we'd like to take the opportunity here to look back over some of the amazing things our community has gotten up to! The following are just a few of the many projects and events that have taken place here; if you have an idea for a project, event, or service that would benefit the local community please get in touch and let us know.
Kinning Park Café and Community Kitchen
KPCafé was launched as a volunteer-led project in 2015 with the aim to support local asylum seekers and refugees with access to affordable food.
The weekly community meals helped build a space to socialise, eat and share advice.
Our Community kitchen brought people together, twice a week, to enjoy affordable fresh food, socialise, and participate in our community kitchen activities. We believe that everyone has a right to access food and that’s why our community kitchen operated a Pay-What-You-Can model, which our Community Meals continue today.
During the pandemic, at our temporary home of Clyde Community Hall, our staff and volunteers delivered grocery packs, cooked food and other essential items to people affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. We provided the equivalent of 34,000 meals to our community.
In October 2020 we opened our socially distanced support café where our community members could socialise safely over a fresh meal and access guidance & support. In August 2021 we began to host our drop-in community meals again. We ran Community Meals at Ibrox Parish Church in late 2021.
In May 2022, as we got access back into the refurbished building, we began a weekly community meal, reconnecting with our community and recruiting volunteers to support future community meals.#
As the number of attendees grew, we developed a training programme for volunteers to learn and develop in our kitchen. By November 2022 we had 200 people attending our meals every week.
We started a ‘Fresh Frozen Meal’ project supplying 1100 take away meals to support those experiencing food poverty in our local neighbourhood. By the end of the project in March 2023, in 3 years, we had supplied 53,000 meals and accrued 3200 volunteer hours.
Feedback from Community Members
Community Well-being and Participation
During lockdown, our team were there at the community meals to listen and help, building trusting relationships with our community members which allowed us to provide tailored advice and guidance on a variety of issues they were experiencing. We organised various events and activities to promote well-being, enable connections, and reduce isolation. We encouraged participation in KPC projects and elsewhere and supported people to access volunteering opportunities and build their confidence and skills.
Our community mental health worker, Kevin, who first started at KPC in 2017, talked of Tuesdays in particular: ‘the atmosphere has been so good, you could come in and all you could hear was laughter; people who hadn’t spoken to each other coming together, playing a board game, talking, coming together’. During the lockdown, Kevin was the only person some people were getting to see week to week. He is glad to have got to
see the changes in the building, the growing of the staff team, and what he described as ‘the evolution of the place’. In particular, he appreciates having got a chance to work with community members seeking asylum: ‘for some people, we’ve been their first port of call when they didn’t know anyone else. Many people I supported have now moved on with their lives. I’d like to think KPC has been an important part of their journey. It’s
been great to watch them grow and get on with their lives, get their status, get work, a flat.’
KPCouturé
Our very own fashion brand, KPCouturé grew out of our Climate Challenge Funded project in 2017. It's main aim was to diversify the conversations around sustainability through workshops in the community which taught mending and upcycling skills.
We also made jewellery and accessories from the plastic waste in the building to raise money that was reinvested into Kinning Park Complex.
The process of jewellery making
Some of the ways we made jewellery from plastic, using a custom plastic shredder.