What does community mean to you?

Jack | Te Whanganui-a-Tara

Jack, restaurant manager at Everybody Eats, highlights how sharing meals with respect and care creates connection, community, and life-changing support for people experiencing vulnerability.

“Kia ora! I’m Jack. I’m the restaurant manager here at Everybody Eats in Wellington.

Simply put I think Everybody Eats ticks all my values. I think there’s a really powerful kind of case study for how humanity should be by having all walks of life in the same room together, eating the same kai and being looked after the same. Just being looked after equally.

There is an incredible sense of community within the volunteers as well. And I think if you sit next to someone who’s really different from you in every way, ethnically, financially, societally, but you are just sharing the same meal and having a little chat. You connect on a human level, at a really basic human level, and I think that’s where real community has a lot of power. Just allowing people to understand each other so much better.

It happens everyday but there are a lot of people that are living quite vulnerably that are experiencing homelessness in our city. It’s quite prevalent at the moment, sadly. We had a gentleman come through here, who would come up and grab a takeaway – he didn’t really want to come into the restaurant, he was a bit nervous, didn’t really like people. And slowly just built that trust up with him. Got to know who he was and know his name, and we even learned where he was sleeping. And so sometimes one of our volunteers would take him a meal if he hadn’t shown. We’d take him a meal after service, and we slowly built a bit of a friendship up, and that slowly moved into him coming in for dinner.

And by coming into the restaurant, he was able to meet other people, and one of the people he met was someone who had a connection at the Wellington City Mission. And slowly through that, he was able to enter their housing project.

And it took a long time, this is over about a year but he’s now off the streets. He’s now, in a mission house. He still comes in for dinner randomly, but he’s found a new community. Just by having that respect shown to him as a person, regardless of his situation, was really powerful and it changed his life.

I haven’t had anyone leave here without feeling better than when they arrived. We know our regulars, we know their names, we know what they like, and we accommodate them straight away and so, you go from guest to kind of friendship to whānau by the end of it all.”