UGK COMMUNITY FIRST CORP
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Mission Statement
UGK Community First (UGK-CF) provides a consistent source of healthy and nutritious, chef-made meals to those in need, particularly those in food insecure areas and those currently adversely affected by COVID-19. UGK-CF will support Corona-affected families and neighborhoods through the crisis at which time we will turn our energies fully to the support of families and children who live in constant food insecure and underserved environments as well as those who find themselves in food insecure situations due to environmental or social events.
About This Cause
UGK Community First: Feeding the Body, Mind & Soul of the Community - One Meal at a Time UGK-CF was created in March 2020 when Richmond, Virginia-based Underground Kitchen (UGK) was forced to shutter its roving experiential dining company in response to the growing COVID crisis. Prior to the pandemic, UGK traveled from city-to-city producing lavish seven course, wine paired dinners featuring the menus and stories of some of the best up-and-coming chefs of color and women chefs in the U.S. As the lockdown took hold in Virginia, UGK saw an immediate need in their home community created by the crisis; both for healthy meals to be delivered to those in need as well as for those in the food and restaurant industries to have access to a safe work environment to continue to support their families. Since its inception, with the help of our network of chefs and farmers, our stalwart staff, an outpouring of community support and an army of over 200 volunteers, UGK-CF has delivered over 70,000 meals throughout the Richmond Metro Region. At the beginning of the crisis, distributions spanned all socioeconomic levels and included those in lockdown and quarantine, workers who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, as well as first responders and front line workers. Throughout the summer of 2020 as the local emergency response stabilized, focus shifted to those food insecure and underserved families and individuals who, pandemic or not, continually struggle. As the pandemic has persisted and UGK-CF's experiences with, and relationships within, the different city neighborhoods, other local nonprofits, and city departments have deepened, it has become ever clearer just how deep the need for access to consistent, healthy and nutritious food goes in our underserved communities. Our focus is on making the community as a whole stronger while recognizing the importance of being attentive to different groups within the community; different cultures, dietary needs, environmental limitations, and food preferences. We believe that successful program development begins at the community level - within the neighborhoods and different neighborhood groups - working with them to understand their needs and challenges and how we can best begin to meet them. In just the last 10 months since our crisis-inspired founding, we have secured a multi-year lease for a commercial kitchen that allows for the increased production and distribution of meals. The kitchen puts us in downtown Richmond and directly at the "foot" of many of the neighborhoods we serve. Our new location also gives us the opportunity to expand our programming to include the construction of our own urban kitchen gardens and nearby market garden, as well as establish a program for workforce development. UGK-CF's urban kitchen garden will be located on our commercial kitchen property and its harvests will supplement the meals we produce. The space will also be used as a place for community workforce development opportunities and an educational space for school and neighborhood groups. Our market garden is being developed on a 5-acre plot of land generously shared with UGK-CF by a local Episcopal Church just outside of the city limits in Henrico County. This larger garden, like the urban kitchen garden, will be used to provide the kitchen with fresh produce for meal production. In the long-term, UGK-CF sees this as a larger educational and training center that will focus on sustainable farming, preservation of fresh foods, and ongoing cooking lessons. Post-pandemic, we see it as a rural community space where family and school groups can visit to learn more about where their food comes from and how to work with fresh foods to create a more healthy lifestyle. Our commercial kitchen is located in a space shared with the City's Parks & Recreation Department Workforce Development Program. Through our partnership with their program, and with several other nonprofits and departments in the city such as Senior Connections and the Richmond Police Department, we will be able to train qualified applicants in basic kitchen work, the culinary arts, basic garden maintenance, garden management, broader agriculture/farming, as well as (through our for-profit, UGK) finer dining service, hospitality, logistics, and event design. When we pivoted from a high-end experiential dining company to feeding a community in crisis we thought we would operate until our food and funding ran out. However, after only a week of truly seeing the disparity in our city and hearing the stories of need, stress, and never-ending worry first-hand, we knew that this was work that needed to continue. Our over-arching goal (when the pandemic has subsided) is to refine a community program that encompasses access to consistent healthy meals, education about healthy cooking, workforce development, and community engagement that can be replicated successfully.