Yes you can! Conscious Kitchen is open for everyone who wants to join our dinners. With a capacity of 80 people, we can usually create a space for you if you join us on time. Walk in for the dinners are from 18:45 to 19:15 on Tuesday evenings!

We use a contribution system, where we either ask people to contribute through volunteering or by making a financial contribution to our cause. Our suggested contribution starts at €5,50 and we use a pay-it-forward system, so any additional contributions will support someone who might not be able to afford it. This way we try to remain accessible to all!

We encourage anyone to jump right in by signing up as a volunteer. No specific knowledge or skills are needed. You can sign up for a shift. The link to the sign up sheet is posted on our social media pages and on the Teams page. The link is available as soon as the event is posted.

You can help us with market pickups, cooking, serving and cleaning. To learn how, just check out the question on how to volunteer on this page. If you want to get involved in background work or to be a coordinator taking a guiding role in each shift, come talk to us personally or send us a message. Other than getting involved actively, we invite you to come and talk to us at a dinner if you have any ideas to improve our events. We’re always open to feedback and suggestions! In addition, you could support us by spreading our message and inviting people to our dinner.

We started out in October 2016 as The Kitchen The Hague, organising weekly Sustainability Network Dinners. We realised there were many sustainability-related initiatives in and around The Hague and we thought it would be great to get people from these various organisations together over a dinner. Of course, we wanted the dinners themselves to be sustainable, so we used food that would otherwise have been thrown away. First we received most of the food from supermarkets, and later on local markets gave us more fruits and vegetables than we could eat. We started off with ten to twenty guests at our dinners and reached to over a hundred in spring 2017. We now host a maximum of 70 people to ensure enough food and space for everyone.

We first called ourselves The Kitchen The Hague, as the kitchen for us represents a central place in the house where a family gets together. Next to this community-aspect, we were looking for a name that also reflects our other values of conscious living and sustainability. That is how we came up with Conscious Kitchen.

Our primary goal is to bring people together over food. At the same time, we also want to fight food waste by cooking with fruits and veggies that would otherwise have been thrown away. On top of that, we aim to create awareness on sustainability: about the scale of food waste, about cooking with whatever is given to you and about how good plant-based food can be.