Kensington-Windsor Terrace Mutual Aid Cookbook Project

Situated south of Prospect Park, Kensington is a Brooklyn neighborhood containing incredible diversity among multiple lines of difference. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in March of 2020, neighbors mobilized a multiprong mutual aid effort. Six years later, we still have a free fridge and a biweekly Neighborhood Cooperative Food Project, as food insecurity continues to be an acute issue for many. We order food in bulk from a local farm cooperative and distribute it to neighbors. Some neighbors are getting “solidarity” orders that are funded through a mark up on the orders of neighbors who can afford to pay for their food and fundraising, but everyone uses the same order form and picks up their orders in the same location. There is no means testing or proof of need required, with some neighbors switching from solidarity to paying categories and vice versa as their circumstances change. The project brings together three major linguistic groups in our neighborhood: Spanish, Bangla, and English. On any given week, there are between 40 and 50 neighbors helping sort the delivery, organizing the distribution, and picking up food from neighbors’ yards.

Part of our order from Lancaster Farm (a worker-owned coop) is a box of vegetables. We don’t know what we get ahead of time, and there are many conversations among neighbors about different vegetables and what can be made from them, comparisons across cultures, and likes and dislikes. We used the SPCUNY grant as an opportunity to deepen these conversations into co-creation of a trilingual cookbook, with recipes submitted by neighbors participating in the food project. Entries were submitted in all three languages by dictation, hand-written notes, and electronically. We used the grant to pay a small honorarium to contributors, pay translators, and to cover the costs of the final design and printing costs. We used Radix, a local worker-owned, union print shop. The process of co-creating the cookbook was lengthier than anticipate but fostered conversations that we had not even anticipated. To celebrate the launch of the cookbook, we held an event at the local DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving, a social justice organization active in the South Asian community in the area) office in July 2026; we have more cookbook community events planned for harvest season in the fall of 2026.