our mission:
Yale Community Kitchen powers Yale’s student-run soup kitchen.
One of YHHAP's most popular projects, Yale Community Kitchen (YCK) is Yale’s student-run soup kitchen on campus. We serve food donated by Yale Dining on Friday on Saturday evenings in the United Parish House across from TD, the satellite location of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK). In response to the pandemic, we adapted our project to public health guidelines and now serve bagged to-go meals donated by the organizations above. Together, DESK and YCK continue to serve evening meals seven days a week to hungry citizens of New Haven. We have served over 100,000 meals! Learn more about us on our Instagram @yalecommunitykitchen.
FALL 2024 UPDATE:
Over the Summer of 2024, YCK consistently opened on Saturdays, serving hundreds of guests from June through August.
We are excited to return to Friday and Saturday service for the school year, with annual events including our yearly food drive, Trick-or-Eat, for DESK on Halloween!
How to get involved:
Serve with Yale Community Kitchen.
Volunteers may sign up for a prep shift at 3:30-5:15 pm or a service shift at 4:45-6:30 pm on either Fridays or Saturdays, all throughout the academic year. You can volunteer just once, or every week — it's completely up to you and volunteers are welcome to join at any time. We send out signups on a weekly basis over email. Visit this website to subscribe to Yale Community Kitchen. Feel free to contact our project heads at their emails below!
YCK is a wonderful way to provide a service to others and to form relationships both with fellow students and the people we serve. If you’re looking for a flexible way to get more involved in directly serving the New Haven community, join us for a shift at YCK.
Project Heads: Madeline Pitre (madeline.pitre@yale.edu), Nolyn Mjema (nolyn.mjema@yale.edu), Brady Xie (brady.xie@yale.edu), and Emily Neumeyer (emily.neumeyer@yale.edu). For partnership inquiries, we encourage you to contact yck@deskct.org for the most timely response.
Coordinators: Tejita Agarwal, Cheryl Chen, Yaya Guo, Luke Mozarsky, Sheikh Nahiyan, Stephanie Shao, Juliana Surprenant, Kadidia Sylla, Halli Watson, Owen Wheeler, Santiago Calderon, Justin Hsieh, Lael Joseph, Jasmine Simmons, Andrew Sung