Cooking up connections: Share Kai celebrates community and culture

Share Kai recently joined forces with Uniting Canterbury Women to host a lunch with our Afghan Cooks Collective member Sakina and women from the diverse communities who call Ōtautahi home. It was a lovely experience working alongside another local community organisation dedicated to bringing people together, celebrating our diversity and connecting over kai.

Thank you to Jo Bailey for the following excerpt of their story about our mahi.

Sometimes very special community initiatives come along which are a total win-win. Share Kai definitely fits that category.

For the last two years, women from refugee and migrant backgrounds in Ōtautahi have been given the opportunity, through Share Kai, to share their incredible cuisines and cultures with the wider community. At the same time they have been learning valuable business and financial skills, connecting with the wider community, and working towards achieving financial security.

But the benefits don’t stop there. Thousands of people from all backgrounds in Waitaha Canterbury have now come together at various Share Kai events to enjoy delicious Nepali/Bhutanese, Eritrean, Afghan, and now Moroccan meals cooked by members of the Share Kai Cooks Collective, in a joyful celebration of diversity and inclusivity.

“Everyone benefits. That’s what we love about Share Kai,” says Programme Director, Holly Griffin, who has led the development of the programme into a thriving entity, with many different initiatives now reaching all corners of the community. “Refugee and migrant women can face real barriers when entering the workforce and integrating into society in Aotearoa. We have made the Share Kai Cooks Collective very accessible, so there are no barriers to women joining, not even language,” she says.

The Share Kai initiative sits under the umbrella of InCommon, an organisation set up after the mosque attacks, with the aim to create a more inclusive society and give people from different faiths and cultures the opportunity to make meaningful connections in an approachable and fun way. Share Kai started as a concept to help achieve these goals, says Holly, who is also the Programme Director at InCommon.

“From the beginning we decided food was a really good way to bring people together. It’s very levelling and everyone can get on board with talking about food and learning about different cultures through food. That’s where the concept came from.”

Read the full story here.

Women connect over Afghan food at the Share Kai lunch during Uniting Canterbury Women’s Around the World in 8 Cafe series, October 2024.