El Calvario, Cali · three days a week

A hot meal for 150 people, three days a week.

El Calvario is one of the hardest neighbourhoods in Cali. Three days a week our team cooks there and serves 150 people. A meal costs $5, and because volunteers cook and some ingredients are donated, your gift buys the part nobody gives away.

Feed someone — $5 Come and cook

A Fundación Cloud volunteer crouching to feed split wood into an open fire beneath a large steaming cooking pot in a street. — **El Calvario, Cali.** Cooking for 150 people. One pot, one wood fire, one volunteer feeding it.

The numbers

150people fed each serving day
3days a week
450meals in a week
$5the cost of one meal

You can check that arithmetic and we would rather you did. Four hundred and fifty meals a week at five dollars is $2,250 — that is what a full week of the kitchen costs, and it is the largest single thing a regular donor can underwrite outright.

What happens on a serving day

Volunteers shop and prep. Some ingredients are donated by traders in the market; the rest are bought. The prep is done by hand, by people who are not paid for it.
The food is cooked on site. One large pot over a wood fire, in the open, in the neighbourhood where it will be eaten.
Everything is plated before anyone arrives. This matters. Nobody queues while watching their meal being made, and nobody is served last.
The meal is served, and so is everything else. Alongside food there is a clothing bank, and on some days a barber. People come for a plate and leave having also had a haircut and a conversation.
The team stays to clean up. Then they come back and do it again in two days.

Dozens of plates of food laid out in rows on tables at the El Calvario food centre, ready to be served. — **El Calvario.** Plated and waiting. Every plate on that table is one person who walked in.

Why we name the neighbourhood

Plenty of charities describe their work as reaching “vulnerable communities in Latin America”. We would rather tell you it is El Calvario, in Cali, because anyone who knows that city knows exactly what that means — and because a specific claim is one you can check.

It is not an easy place to work. That is the reason the kitchen exists, and it is the reason we would rather you knew where your money is going than read a sentence designed to make you comfortable.

The people who cook it

Three Fundación Cloud volunteers sitting on plastic chairs peeling potatoes at a market, smiling at the camera. — **El Calvario, Cali.** Most of serving looks like this. Someone has to peel the potatoes.

A Fundación Cloud volunteer taking a selfie with about ten other volunteers, including cooks in aprons, outside a street kitchen. — **El Calvario, Cali.** The team you would be joining — cooks, drivers, musicians, people who carry things.

$5 is one plate. $750 is everyone who comes, for a whole day.

A week of the kitchen — all three serving days, 450 meals — costs $2,250.