Meet our Fellows

Chelsea Spyres: Wilmington Kitchen Collective

Wilmington, Delaware

Large church kitchens sit unused and empty most days of the week.

New cooks and bakers, caterers, and food truck operators find that access to commercial kitchen space is difficult to find – not to mention prohibitively expensive. This struggle often stops these budding entrepreneurs before their business even has a chance to launch.

The Wilmington Kitchen Collective and Pastor Chelsea Spyres put two and two together  and created a new way for churches to live out their mission of feeding the community while offering new businesses a chance to thrive. 

 The Wilmington Kitchen Collective is a community-based project dedicated to serving food industry entrepreneurs from marginalized local communities. By providing affordable, high-quality commercial kitchen space, found in local churches, the Collective offers small food-based businesses a chance to flourish. Churches benefit from the additional income along with increased foot traffic and new connections in the community. It’s a win-win for everyone.

The WKC provides more than just space for baking bread and chopping vegetables. Along with low-cost shared kitchen facilities that meets all Health department requirements, the Collective offers entrepreneurs the chance to participate in business training and mentoring, increasing their access to capital and start up grants, as well as increased media exposure and collaboration with a number of business partners. And more importantly, the collective provides a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, offering each small business owner support and encouragement in a world that is often competitive and isolating.

Invested Faith Fellow Chelsea Spyres serves as the Executive Director of this growing enterprise and as Pastor of Riverfront Ministries. After working with people experiencing homelessness in Detroit, the Delaware native returned home to begin serving at Riverfront Ministries, a church that gathers outdoors for services much of the year. Chelsea loves gathering community around food and fellowship, telling stories of the food vendors and making local connections.