On 23 February Kākano Café and Cookery School opened at 100 Peterborough Street in Christchurch – a first of its kind. Funded primarily by Te Pūtahitanga o Te Waipounamu, the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency for the South Island, Kākano Café and Cookery School is proudly whānau focused – whānau learning, whānau benefitting from healthy lifestyles and whānau living sustainably off the land.
Jade Temepara (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is the visionary behind the project. She has boundless energy and a passion for growing her own food, and the skills and healing that comes with that. Over the last 16 years, Jade and her husband Wiki have demonstrated a selfless belief in the value of growing kai, saving seeds, cooking, preserving, pickling, fermenting and harvesting food that is not just great for the puku but nurturing for the soul.
As the founder of the ‘Hand Over a Hundy’ project, Jade grew in confidence and began helping families and particularly young parents to begin growing food as a more healthy option. The success of ‘Hand over a Hundy’ was followed by a period of exploration in garden design. Jade has won various awards in the Ellerslie International Flower Show, featured in numerous articles, TED talks and garden publications, and has won the New Zealand Gardener of the year award.
All of these areas led her to dream bigger, and create plans for a large central city urban farm/garden where she could run a café, hold workshops, tend the gardens and start a seed saving bank.
The whānau are actively involved in the café, including the five tamariki and Pōua Colin, who first planted the seed, literally, for the garden of vision.
Life in Vacant Spaces has supported the scheme by giving the space to set up their site. The Christchurch City Council provided support to enable Kākano Café to have chemical-free garden beds and an action plan to reduce waste, through the opportunity of the Sustainable Initiatives Fund. Hale Compound Conditioning and Help for the Homeless have also played an important role in shaping the ideas into reality.
Kākano Café is much more than a café. The café transforms at night into a space for workshops, seminars and cooking classes. Each Friday night Kākano Café will host a movie screening and a hāngī. These are whānau-friendly events to promote connections across the community. On Wednesdays there will be wahine evenings – time for women to come together, be inspired by an amazing speaker and share some delicious mānuka tea, a beetroot smoothie and a tītī sandwich. The cooking school helps to build a sense of community, adding to the knowledge bank of skills and educational opportunities. The urban farm will enable collective efforts to grow affordable food, to build a whānau of growers and producers.
The kaupapa is all about creating the optimum conditions for whānau to thrive. The kai is affordable, healthy, free-range, fresh, 100% nutrient dense, organic and spray-free. It’s all focused on feeding the whenua, the culture and the whānau – manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga, whakawhanaungatanga. It is, indeed, a dream come true.
The gardens at Kākano Café and Cookery School.
Jade Temepara.
