Home Kong Kitchen has been on a roll and making serious dough! We’ve spent the past two years turning our kitchens into mini-Hiroshimas and baking a difference to feed Hong Kong’s homeless!
Our initiative started as a response to news reports that Breadline and other food waste charities were struggling to feed the homeless during the 3rd Wave of the pandemic. The NGO, founded by Daisy Tam Diers, relies on food waste donations from bakeries, cafes and restaurants to deliver bread to vulnerable people living on the streets, in shelters and refuges. But with cafes and restaurants operating restricted hours at low capacity, Breadline and other food waste charities were struggling to meet demand at a time it had never been higher.
So, after reading about their struggles and reaching out to Daisy, Home Kong Kitchen founder Sadie Kaye rallied a small group of friends, family and neighbors together and what started out as the Baker’s Dirty Half Dozen began to bake our own and donate it to Breadline in weekly food drives.
As more and more bighearted Homekongers have joined our cause, Home Kong Kitchen has risen. We now bake, collect and deliver homemade breads, bagels and muffins to people living on the streets, in unlicensed shelters and refuges most days as an independent community project.
We also collect supermarket-bought loaves generously donated by our growing community of bread donators from their homes all over Hong Kong! Since Oct 2020, we’ve donated bread and other gifts to homeless charity ImpactHK every week!
Other Hong Kong charities we have proudly supported include Bethune House, Loved Flock, Christian Action HK, the Mission For Migrant Workers and Refugee Union. In June 2021 Home Kong Kitchen was awarded a Happy Homes Award by the Mission For Migrant Workers and in July we received a certificate of recognition as top fundraiser for Bethune House.
Christmas 2020 saw us create and distribute nearly 300 Christmas Gift Socks filled with tasty treats, practical necessities and little luxuries to the homeless via the unlicensed shelters and refuges we regularly donate to and ImpactHK. Our 2021 Christmas Gift Sacks campaign was even bigger and in 2022 we collaborated with 3D Jelly Art enthusiast Siamy Tan to provide a very jelly Christmas!
Lunar New Year saw us break all of our previous records with bumper deliveries of food, clothing and other gifts for ImpactHK and a special event for refugees at Refugee Union: Cream Teas for Refugees! Easter 2021 saw us deliver dozens of Afternoon Teas to the homeless and migrants in need. Our 2022 Easter Bun Run was even more epic!
World Refugee Day saw us collect and donate special deliveries of food, clothes and other essentials for refugees @Refugee Union and the homeless @ImpactHK, eclipsing our previous record at Lunar New Year many times over! Our Diwali Deliveries were particularly well received thanks to our wonderful volunteers in the Indian community.
Since the start of 2021 we’ve delivered free breakfasts to anybody who needs it anywhere in Hong Kong! To request breakfast for yourself or your shelter, kindly email hello@homekongkitchen.com or fill in the form on our contact page!
Although baking, collecting and delivering fresh bread remains at the heart of what we do, the past year has seen us expand our core mission to set up Home Kong Clothing Exchange and create all kinds of hand crafted gifts for our homeless friends, thanks to our growing community of young artists!
Our cutest project yet saw us collect and donate items you would find in a wash bag to the homeless via ImpactHK! Thanks to our incredible community, we collected enough amenities to fill 100 wash bags! The stunning wash bags were designed and sewn using recycled cotton by our youngest volunteers: a team of utterly inspiring 7-16 year olds spearheaded by 15 year old aspiring costume designer Mia Shroff!
Our collaborations with 3D Jelly Artist Siamy Tan and Easter Bun Run were highlights of the past year but our biggest achievement of 2022 was simply that we kept going throughout the 5th Wave when restrictions on movement and gatherings were extremely tough and tricky to navigate and panic buying was causing food shortages and terrible suffering for the most vulnerable. In Sept 2022 we were proud to receive a certificate of recognition from Bethune House and the Mission for Migrant Workers for supporting migrants in distress through the 5th Wave.
We have loads more special events planned for late 2022 and 2023, including a Picnic Project, our Muffin and Gingerbread Runs for the elderly, baking workshops, art and craft exhibitions of our artists’ work and a charity cookbook! Every cent of what we make is donated to the homeless charities, shelters and refuges we support. Follow us for details of how you can contribute or attend!
We are also setting up our own bijou pâtisserie, where you can order our home baked breads, bagels, muffins and other goodies online and we deliver it to your homes! We can’t promise it will be the best you’ve ever tasted, but we CAN promise that everything you eat has been made with love and every cent we make is donated directly to homeless charities.
Concerned by the amount of plastic we were using to wrap our home baked goods, we designed and created sustainable bread boxes out of recycled waste. Each bread box is illustrated with doodled designs by marginalized artists and inscribed with a simple message of hope and solidarity for our homeless friends.
There are many ways you can volunteer for Home Kong Kitchen. You can bake a difference as a home baker, you can make a difference by donating a single loaf of bread a week, or you can create a difference as an artist on our sustainable breadboxes and other crafty creative projects!
Thank you for your flour power, inspiring creativity and endless generosity. 💗
Home Kong Kitchen 