World Central Kitchen (WCK) uses the power of food to ‘nourish communities and strengthen economies in times of crisis and beyond’.
Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, WCK provides a new kind of disaster response helping devastated communities recover and redevelop after natural disasters. WCK’s Chef Relief Team goes directly to the frontlines to start cooking and provide meals to people in need. With quick action that harnesses the power of local resources, in real-time, WCK can respond to multiple disasters at once.
For his work with WCK, José Andrés won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Award for Humanitarian of the Year and was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time in 2018. WCK is a registered 501(C)3 non-profit organization 27–3521132
As of 2021 WCK has served more than 50 million meals to people impacted by natural disasters and other crises around the world in countries including The Bahamas, Indonesia, Lebanon, Mozambique, Venezuela, and the United States.
World Central Kitchen operates with a unique model that provides relief on three different levels. With disaster, recovery, and resilience operations WCK targets help in the short, medium, and long term. Through the power of food, the people at WCK are strengthening communities in times of disaster and encouraging opportunity and growth in the time after the primary effects have faded.
Recovery
WCK’s Recovery work focuses on food and nutrition to help communities rehabilitate and rebuild after natural disasters, humanitarian emergencies, and other acute crises. This aid is designed to offer support in the medium-term, the rebuilding and recovery time that comes after a disaster. WCK establishes projects that last after the immediate relief response is met with access to food when normal supply paths have been destroyed.
Resilience
After recovery, then comes resilience, the long-term approach that allows communities to build and develop long after the initial disaster. Through locally-led approaches, WCK creates programs to ‘advance human and environmental health, offer access to professional culinary training, create jobs, and improve food security.’ The resilience element of the charity began after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with the belief that ‘food can be a powerful agent of positive change in distressed communities.’
WCK’s Resilience Programs in the Caribbean and Central America have now trained hundreds of chefs and school cooks, advanced clean cooking practices, and awarded grants to farms, fisheries, and small food businesses while also providing training and networking opportunities.
To date, WCK has built or rehabilitated 150 school and community kitchens in Haiti and Guatemala and has trained more than 705 school cooks. These cooks are now responsible for feeding more than 80,000 students in Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras.
How can the MUNCH community help?
As always, if a charity is selected for support by the MUNCH community, 100% of the donations generated by MUNCH transactions (currently 3% of each transaction) will be sent to the charity, automatically and trustlessly.
In addition, when active MUNCH staking will allow people to chose a variable amount of their staking rewards to go to the charity. Finally, all donations routed through the MUNCH charity circle will be sent to the charity that is chosen through the vote.
You can cast your vote here.
The potential work with World Central Kitchen was made possible through our partnership with The Giving Block.
