What is the Southern Illinois Collaborative Kitchen?
Collaborative Kitchen is an experiment in community support. How can we show up for each other when we need it the most? How can we create a community that can trust in the resilience and support of it’s members?
We do this through our pay-what-you can meals, created in partnership with local restaurants and using local ingredients whenever possible. This helps us ensure that our community members can access meals regardless of finances. It also allows us to invest in our local restaurant economy by working directly with locally owned businesses and food producers.
Pay-What-You-Can Meal Banks
The Southern Illinois Collaborative Kitchen provides backing funds to create and sustain Meal Banks at our partnering restaurants. We guarantee 25 meals a week that can be accessed free of cost. That means anyone can get a Pay-What-You-Can meal as long as there are meals in the bank.
Patrons who would like to support the program can choose to make a donation for their meal. Donations are not required!
But donations add more meals to the bank that others will be able to access.
Currently, our meals cost about $6, this means a donation of $6 completely covers the cost of the meal and a donation of $12 covers the meal cost PLUS adds another meal to the bank.
Saturday Meal Distribution
Upcoming Distributions:
Saturday, March 1st
Saturday, March 15th
Saturday, March 29th
Saturday, April 12th
Meals can be requested on the Wednesday prior to the distribution and picked up on Saturday between 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM from the back parking lot of Cristaudo’s Cafe, 209 S Illinois Ave in Carbondale, IL.
