Get Cauldron Collective a Worker-Owned Food Truck

Hey there, we're Kim Conyers, Olive Cooke, and Sylvia Metta, and we are the founders of Kansas City's first completely worker-owned food business, Cauldron Collective. We are currently three trans women who have served plant-based comfort food around KC through pop-ups at various places for the past year and are just recently settling in with pop-ups at The Ship once a week. You can read all about us in Feast, Startland News (twice), Flatland, and The Pitch.

 

 

We are all long-time veterans of the foodservice industry, and our frustration with the conditions of our jobs and our love of cooking combined brought us together. We wanted to start the whole concept of a restaurant from scratch and create something where everyone working in the business has a say and sees the benefits from their work. This idea is practiced in other worker-owned models around the country, and we were surprised to find how uncommon this was in Kansas City and the Midwest in general. After some meetings, emails, books, and zines on completely restructuring the typical foodservice model, Cauldron Collective was born.

 

 

We started with almost no money on our end, a couple hundred dollars to buy ingredients and supplies for our first pop-up. It sold out as soon as it was announced. Since then, everything we have done has been from the income we've made, with no investors other than the people who directly support us by buying our food. We are now looking to expand beyond that, and we have decided that the next best step to take is to buy a food truck. We are currently talking with interested sellers but need more money to make the first leap.

 

 

Purchasing a food truck would allow us to completely invest ourselves in the business we are so passionate about. We all currently work other jobs to keep ourselves afloat, and while the Collective is profitable, we now only have access to our service space once or twice a week, which isn't enough to be our sole income. We see this as a step in our end goal of a community brick and mortar space and then eventually inspiring and influencing even more worker-owned collectives after us. And while we are discussing investments and loans, community support helps keep our vision accurate, as we are trying to offer the ability for average workers to become business owners without having to offer up a tremendous amount of money to buy into it.

 

Your donation would help us:

 

-Purchase A Food Truck.

So we have a place to operate out of!

-Build It Out

We will probably need to install equipment and get tables and chairs for people to eat at!

-Buy A Generator

These things don't power themselves!

-Create Signage

We're gonna have to decorate it to fit our incredibly cute aesthetic, of course!

-Get Needed Equipment

spatulas, bowls, cambros, a blender that doesn't overheat every few minutes!

 

If you can't help by donating, you can always share the fundraiser or even buy food from us at one of our pop-ups or every Monday at The Ship in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, MO. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at @cauldroncollectivekc. We have a big goal but hope to get things in motion to start wheeling ourselves around this summer. Anything you can do at all helps, and we would be eternally grateful. We are trying to deconstruct a too often exploitive industry, and anyway you can help us show that there's a better way, helps show that to everyone.

 

<3 CC