The Three Hope Kitchen Services- New Hope, Re_Store and Green Shoots
Proposal code:
AP-2025-06-135
Hope Kitchen comprises; Re_Store, New Hope Café and Green Shoots Garden welcome all in the community but we need to improve our accessibility for people with disabilities to be fully inclusive.
Estimated Price
48000
Hope Kitchen are looking to make improvements to its three sites, Re_Store, Green Shoots and New Hope Cafe to improve accessibility. Amongst our participants 30% have a physical disability that impacts on their ability to fully access all of our services. This includes visual and hearing impairment, wheel chair use, poor mobility and dementia. Works that need completed are; a wheelchair lift for the Re_Store shop to ensure access to the rescued food and workshop space, new shop fittings to improve wheelchair accessibility, a new flat roof for the resucued food area as there are regular leaks which makes the area sometimes unusable and unsafe, a new floor that improves the acoustics in the New Hope Café and improved pathways and a wheelchair accessible indoor growing space at Green Shoots Community Garden.
Hope Kitchen is a well established, well loved project that serves the needs of some our most vulnerable in our community. However, one area that we get regular negative feedback on by people who either want to use our services and can’t or those who do use our services but find that they are restricted in their use, or that their user experience is not good, surrounds accessibility. Not being able to access all of Re_Store is a challenge for many, the flooring in the community café is a problem for people with hearing impairment and dementia and people with poor mobility can’t currently access any of the community garden.
The work will mean that we will be able to provide a vastly improved service for all of our users and more specifically people with disabilities. The indoor growing space would benefit all of the Green Shoots users as currently there is no indoor growing space and the garden is open all year round and so we would be able to grow more varied food and also have somewhere warm to work in the winter.
All the work will be completed by March 2026.
Hope Kitchen is the lead partner of Re_Store which is a charity shop, rescued food initiative and a repair workshop space focusing on reducing food and clothing waste, promoting community wealth building principles and providing a hub in the community with a focus on affordable, sustainable fashion, providing low cost household items and food. This initiative grew out of the connecting community collective which was established in 2023. The partnership grew from the understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; because by working together, essential sector organisations can better use resources, share learning, and reach more people in our communities. We aim to strengthen capacity for partnerships, and are working to encourage and support more connections. The key partners are ALIenergy, Oban Youth Café, Hope Kitchen and Healthy Options. These are all local charities that focus on improving the health and wellbeing of people in our communities. As well as these key partnerships other connections have emerged with organisations like the Grab Trust, Atlantis Leisure, the Toy Cupboard, Home start and Adventure Oban.
This collective built on the excellent partnership working already experienced by Hope Kitchen. Services at the café, including access to low/ no cost meals, which are able to be provided through our partnership with Neighbourly and Fareshare. Activities to promote community inclusion, provide employment skills and reduce social isolation at New Hope Café and the Green Shoots Garden are provided in partnership with Enable, Affinity Trust, Carr Gomm, Blue Triangle, With You, NHS’s Community Mental Health Team, Adult Social Care, Criminal Justice Social Work, H20 and Oban High School.
We regularly ask our partners to provide feedback through online questionnaires and in person feedback. One key area of development that has been highlighted by a number of organisations is the need to improve our accessibility and so the improvements that would be delivered by this project would be responding to the feedback of our users and partners.
(there is a proposal through the connecting communities collective for all the costs for the purchase and complete renovation of Re_Store. This EOI is focusing on the key accessibilty needs and urgent repairs)
