Covid Food Relief Efforts

Covid Food Relief Efforts

When the year started it seemed we were rounding the corner on outlasting covid. Wow, we were all wrong. Now as we enter the second year, we know that even last year’s most pessimistic predictions about how long this pandemic would last were too conservative. Renewed lockdowns, slow vaccine rollout, and rapidly spreading new variants of the disease have rolled back much of the success Thailand had last year. As the death toll continues to rise, the threat of the disease is still very real, and the economic implications make people already teetering on survival extremely vulnerable right now.

Click here for our Food Relief Donation Page

For anyone interested to give, we’ll be combining proceeds from our business efforts and your donations to help as many families as possible with rice, cooking oil, and other supplies.

During this time Courageous Kitchen has been offering virtual cooking classes and selling food locally. This has been an unsteady pivot as we’ve struggled to replace the income earned through classes we previously offered to tourists visiting Thailand. For these reasons we’re updating our donation appeals to reflect our need for more support with donations for covid food relief. For anyone interested to give, we’ll be combining proceeds from our business efforts and your donations to help as many families as possible with rice, cooking oil, and other supplies. The cost of these donations each month is $10 per family, and we hope to reach 200 families or more each month.

Our goal is to help people on the border of Thailand and Burma with food supplies. Many of the people there are ineligible for support from the government because they are ethnic minorities without Thai citizenship. With the border closed due to conflict and covid concerns, parents in these families are also without work for the foreseeable future. This month (May 2021) we provided rice, noodles, cooking oil, salt, and other supplies to about 200 families. Of those families, there were about 35 identified as especially vulnerable and they received eggs and fresh produce as well.

Click here for our Food Relief Donation Page

Please find and share our new Food Relief donation page with anyone interested to help in our efforts. If you decide to give through Facebook, local banks, or another campaign be sure to let us know or indicate ‘covid relief’ in the notes portion. This will be an ongoing campaign so we’re especially grateful to those assisting by setting up monthly donations. We’ll be talking about these efforts more in our upcoming cooking classes, so we look forward to engage with you there and on Instagram and social media as well. Thank you!

Two Big Safety Improvements Coming to Courageous Kitchen

We appreciate you checking in with us this month and we’ve got two big announcements to share from Bangkok. The first is that there’s a piece of equipment we’ve needed for quite some time and it’s finally arrived. We’ll give you a hint, it’s not a giant oven, or some expensive “must-have” kitchen gadget.
cooking charity bangkok-2

From Your Hood to Ours

If you’ve been following our story, a few months back we renovated a run down house to be a kitchen space with the help of funding from Bangkok Patana School. The new space allowed for use to have more room to host the swarming children of the neighborhood, who all seem interested in cooking at once. However, even after painting, replacing the floor, and knocking out a wall, the new space still wasn’t much of a kitchen.

That’s because doing more cooking in large groups was nearly impossible to do safely with the little to no airflow in the building. In Thailand, most kitchens are powered by portable gas burners which can be dangerous to use with out safety precautions, including having good ventilation. This also meant when we made traditional chili filled Thai dishes, we didn’t have to do much before everyone in the room was coughing and choking on the spiced filled air which couldn’t escape the room.

cooking charity bangkok-1

The good news is we have just installed a custom made exhaust hood into the room. We should have done this a few months ago, but honestly there had been several delays in making the hood happen. We appealed to private donors and to foundations offering grants, but none of the parties were interested in the not so flashy upgrade to our kitchen. Instead we used funding from your efforts to fund cooking classes this year, and spent about $500 to install a new ventilation hood. The new hood will not only improve the safety of our students, but because it is large enough to accommodate more than one burner, it will also open up greater possibilities for our cooking curriculum in the future.

Securing our Bridge to You

The other big safety upgrade is a bit technical, as we’ve just installed an SSL certificate to encrypt our website. To put it in laymen’s terms, we’ve improved the security of our site to be sure your information is safe. This means whether you’re making a donation, booking a cooking class in Bangkok, or just purchasing a t-shirt, all your information is transmitted safely and securely.

cooking charity bangkok-3

The added encryption to our website also opens up more possibilities in the future as we grow. For example, the added security may expedite further development of online teaching resources, and fundraising products for our own mini-marketplace. And more importantly, it means you can give not only with Paypal, but with any credit card you want, without fretting about being exposed to fraud.

We’re steadily building towards ambitious goals to connect better with you and improve the lives of our students and their families here in Thailand. Thank you for joining us on this journey and stick with us as we grow, and strive to conquer our most ambitious and challenging year yet!