Caritas Vienna is a well-known NGO that is active in many social areas, involving approximately. 5,000 employees and 12,000 volunteers in Vienna as well as in the eastern region of Lower Austria. The array of activities embraces programs in such diversified fields as poverty and homelessness, asylum, migration and integration, family strengthening, community projects, work with disabled people, day care services, home and hospice care. In the global network Caritas Vienna also engages in foreign countries in emergency aid as well as in long-term partnerships.

The department “Stadtteilarbeit” (Neighbourhood Work) realizes community work in different neighbourhoods and has expertise in involving residents and communities, realizing low threshold participation processes, working with vulnerable and socially disadvantaged target groups and building up multipliers within neighbourhoods. In an interdisciplinary team we develop projects of health promotion, community education, integration and socially sustainable neighbourhood development, supporting ideas and initiatives of residents and other local actors, fostering empowerment and selforganization and contributing to processes of social inclusion. Among other projects, we´ve developed a project called Community Cooking and established a Community Kitchen in one of Vienna´s most multicultural neighbourhoods.

Caritas Vienna is well experienced in the management of EU grants (e.g. Erasmus+, Creative Europe, AMIF, ESF, etc.). A team of specifically skilled persons is responsible for the implementation of projects according to EU grant guidelines. Caritas Vienna has a well-established European network that operates at different levels and enables projects to create an EU added value. Our community Kitchen: The kitchen as a space of possibilities.

The project is located in the so-called Vienna’s 10th district ”Favoriten”. Structural social disadvantages and residents of diverse origins characterize the district, but there are hardly any places for encounters. Through community cooking, we want to promote exchange between different cultures and people in the district, enable empowerment and social inclusion, and open up everyday, enjoyable access to healthy and sustainable nutrition.

We organize open cooking sessions for the neighborhood and support different cooking formats for clubs, companies and teams. At the same time, we are constantly expanding the recipe collection and the food repertoire of Community Cooking and are always inviting new people from different communities to our kitchen. Interested people from the neighborhood can also contribute their own ideas and initiatives. Happy activity, a babble of languages, laughter and the clatter of pots and dishes make the community kitchen a lively social meeting place. Cooking functions as a simple medium through which complex processes of communication and learning from one another are set in motion.

https://www.caritas-stadtteilarbeit.at/