Jood Kitchen works to provide high quality meals and reintegrate homeless people into Moroccan society—giving them work and helping them regain dignity. They are looking for a PR idea to help launch their pilot kitchen where formerly homeless chefs will make food to serve local businesses. Jood would like to encourage business leaders to choose them as their food service for their employees. They believe their differentiator is that they can help business’s CSR goals. But we think it’s worth asking why companies would partner with this program over other potential CSR programs? What is the business need that Jood Kitchen has the unique ability to solve? And how can we help Jood Kitchen become a sustainable and growing model that will allow them to focus on their mission instead of fundraising?

To celebrate the opening of Jood Kitchen, we are throwing a community housewarming party, hosted by the formerly homeless Jood kitchen chefs. This event will promote the idea that Jood Kitchen makes hospitality feel like home. We know that in Morocco when you throw a housewarming party, it’s expected you invite everyone for couscous to your house, so we’ll do just that: invite the local businesses to share from a giant community pot of couscous. The businesses will get the taste of home they’ve been looking for, and the chefs can reclaim the dignity of hosting.

For Moroccans, hosting is an obligation. The word Marhba means ‘welcome’ and it’s one of the most common phrases in the Moroccan language. So, being Moroccan is almost synonymous to being a host, but how can you host without a home?

Jood Kitchen allows formerly homeless individuals to reclaim the dignity of hosting. Because as our insight tells us: dignity is not about having, it’s about giving. When businesses give the gift of receiving, they are helping restore the dignity of Jood’s workers.

Therefore this is appealing to businesses because they not only can boost their CSR efforts on paper, but they can meaningfully provide a space for employees that evokes and tastes like home. We’ll target our messaging to key decision makers at local business via channels like LinkedIn. Most importantly, the personal connections made at the event will strengthen the understanding of the benefits of partnering with Jood.

First we’ll send out invites via LinkedIn a few weeks before the October opening. During our housewarming party we’ll encourage Jood Kitchen workers to not just be behind the scenes cooking for the event, but actively hosting the event, sharing their stories and the story of Jood. This human connection as well as the feeling of home and belonging it will create will encourage businesses to want to bring this type of environment to their offices. After the event, as people share photos and stories from the event on their social media channels we will spread our reach further. Press stories from Jood’s media partners can be told from the humanistic angle of hosting and dignity reclaimed or from the business angle of the companies who are making strides on CSR efforts by supporting the homeless community.