Beresford Street Kitchen

About Beresford Street Kitchen

Beresford Street Kitchen is a busy café, meeting point and social hub. However, it is far more than this: the different floors house a number of zones which enable a range of training, work and community engagement.

Beresford Street Kitchen provides workplace opportunities for people with widely ranging skills and life experiences. In particular, it offers people with learning disabilities and autism the chance to develop workplace skills and engage with the community in an inclusive, safe and supportive environment.

We provide both pre-employment work placements, traineeships and an apprenticeship scheme. The pre-employment service provides placements in our training kitchen and printing and production workshops.

We aim to provide approximately twenty trainee and apprentice placements where people with learning disabilities will gain practical experience in a whole range of catering and hospitality operations including customer service skills, barista skills, food preparation.

Each apprentice will also take part in a number of relevant courses and, where suitable, gain qualifications.

The Vision

Our vision is of an inclusive workforce, where people with learning disabilities and autism have the opportunity to maximize their potential, be recognized for their skills and be regarded positively and with respect.

Our mission is to provide quality education, training and employment opportunities for people with learning disabilities and autism by promoting:

Engagement, enablement, opportunity and progression

Community presence

The development of meaningful roles

Co-operation with other organisations that share our aims and objectives

About Aspire

The Aspire Charitable Trust is a Jersey charity, founded in 2015 which aims to provide quality education, training and employment opportunities for people with learning disabilities and autism. It operates through its wholly-owned Jersey company Beresford Street Kitchen Limited (founded in 2016), a multi-faceted social enterprise which will reinvest all of its profits back into the charity.

How it all started

The Aspire Charitable Trust and its wholly owned company Beresford Street Kitchen Limited were established in May 2015, both with exclusively charitable status, by a small group of people comprising Stephen Kendrick, Julian Clyde-Smith, Paul Burton, Paul Bennett, Paul Watson, Eleanor Christie and Valerie Cartwright, all of whom shared a vision of creating a real working environment, comprising a café and workshops, centrally placed in St Helier, where people with learning disabilities and autism could train and work.

A local benefactor provided the premises 17 Beresford Street by way of a 21-year rent free contract lease which was passed on the 23rd October 2015 and the majority of the cost of refurbishment, which took some two years to complete. The café first opened on 7th August 2017 and the print workshop on 9th April 2018.

With that start, Beresford Street Kitchen now has to pay its own way from the income it generates and from charitable donations, but even with rent free premises, it is under-capitalized and is looking for an annual or one-off endowment to secure its future.