World Central Kitchen, Inc.

More than 4 million people die from health issues caused by unclean cookstoves each year. Our Clean Cooking programs seek to demonstrate long-term positive impacts on the health and livelihoods of impoverished communities in the Caribbean and Central America who still cook primarily with wood or charcoal.

WCK builds and renovates school and community kitchens and converts them from cooking with wood or charcoal to clean burning liquid propane gas (LPG). We also install water lines and sinks so cooks can wash and clean more easily. We have transformed more than 140 kitchens in Haiti, making schools a cleaner and safer place to work and lear.

Many school cooks around the world have never had reliable access to water for cleaning and are not familiar with basic kitchen safety and food handling practices. Sink to Stove’s professional chef trainers work with school and community cooks to train them in basic sanitary kitchen and food handling practices so as to help reduce the incidence of food borne illnesses.

We conduct Sink to Stove trainings in all school kitchens that we build or update as part of our Clean Cooking program. We also partner with other organizations that oversee feeding programs in other schools to train their cooks in these important concepts.

World Central Kitchen provides quality, chef-prepared meals to those in need. To date, we have served over 200 million meals to victims of natural disasters around the world.

The program partners with and supports smallholder farmers, fishers, and small food-related businesses that produce or distribute food at a local level by providing funding, training, and networking opportunities. We also connect our grantees with volunteers who form part of a growing agritourism movement that brings much needed economic development to rural communities.

In post-disaster communities, our immediate goal is to help our partners revitalize their operations and begin to regrow their long-term capacity for food production, distribution, and sales. In the long term, we aim to contribute to system-wide improvements in food security and sustainability by building up the day to day capacity of local communities to produce their own food. In doing so, we will also increase their resilience against future disasters.