Giving H.O.P.E. one meal at a time

It’s called H.O.P.E.’s Kitchen and the diner on Ferguson Street is all about helping those in need locally.

Kate Valiquette and her husband Chris, who own Flat-Rate Towing, originally opened their garage to offer meals to the homeless locally but were looking for something more sustainable.

She tells BayToday the original idea was to get a food truck.

“We came across an add on Kijiji for the old Zack’s Corner Restaurant location and thought that’s even better because we could have open through the winter time, make a year-round thing,” she says.

Valiquette says the towing company supports their life and when they first started they were down to their last $50 and struggling to put food on the table.

“Ever since the towing company happened, we’ve had a little bit of a boom in business and the community has been really big on supporting us which is amazing and from there we wanted to be able to give something back,” she says.

Valiquette says anyone can find themselves in need at anytime and they want to help.

“These are people too, we’re all people, this could happen to anybody at any time, even with the COVID crisis, with the layoffs, with people losing their jobs, some people lost their homes, some people lost their business,” she says.

Their Facebook page says profits from the diner are going to go towards buying a piece of land and developing affordable shelter, to create a long term solution to an ever growing problem.

(Photo by Chris Dawson/BayToday.ca)