Cooking for homeless and providing a home for refugee teenagers in Greece

Since November 2017, we have established a protective apartment for homeless teenagers and unaccompanied refugee children that ended up alone in Greece, providing them with safe accommodation, nutrition and daily activities that nourish their healthy growth and independence.

From 2018, we are working with the community of Pervolarides of Thessaloniki to establish a social kitchen, plant urban gardens and nurture abandoned public spaces together with people from diverse local and refugee communities, who join into groups with common concerns and interests in solidarity actions and creative social activities.

Community cooking is our basis for nourishing social inclusion and cooperation. Every Friday we cook and prepare hot food that we distribute to homeless and people in need. Both locals and refugees come together to meet their neighbours, to cook and learn new recipes and to share their love for food and for helping people who are in need.

We are reclaiming food, by collecting products that are expiring and dry food in faulty packing that markets can’t sell as well as fruits, vegetables and fish that otherwise would be dumped. By forming a “social cooperative chain” every week these products are gathered, processed, re-packed into food packs or cooked into hot meals that are distributed to homeless and people in need.

We organise solidarity olive collection each November and work together with the bee populations to produce organic honey. We grow urban gardens and share ecological methods of food cultivation and sustainable food processing, through training activities and workshops that offer vocational skills and create employment possibilities.

Through our collective activities we directly support people in need to become self-sufficient and to overcome discrimination and social isolation. In parallel, we facilitate inclusion and the regeneration of community relations by mobilising locals and refugees together into social solidarity actions and joined activities that plant the seeds for social innovation, cross-cultural synergies and greater community integration. Over the years we are seeing our community expanding and becoming stronger and more diverse. Our social kitchen and community meeting place is in the area of Toumpa, which is also the base for our community gatherings and our food processing and distribution activities.

Our community is a point of reference for social innovation and cooperation, a space where abilities, ideas and wasted resources unite and form dynamic social actions and strong supportive relations; a ground that cultivates community integration and empowers people to come together in solidarity and to co-create resilient and self-reliant communities where divisions and inequalities are healed through collective actions. We nurture a democratic society where people join around their needs, skills and resources and collectively mobilise to overcome exclusion and discrimination and to co-create a dignified and peaceful living environment for themselves and their neighbours.

Ethos in Thessaloniki is a registered voluntary humanitarian association of people that are actively involved with the humanitarian challenges of the crisis in Greece. We are non-profit and sustained economically by our members, volunteers, friends and supporters who commit their personal time and resources in developing our activities. Find out what we do at Ethos and follow our activities on Facebook

Thank you for supporting our activities for homeless and refugees in Greece ❤️