St. Louis County couple convert home into community kitchen for homeless, 150,000 hot meals served
By Melanie Johnson
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CLAYTON, Missouri (KMOV) — A St. Louis County couple’s mission to feed the hungry has taken over their home.
“Anybody that needs food. We give it to them,” Riz Khan, President of the Little Angels Foundation, said. “Whether it’s a crazy winter, whether it’s snowing, whether it’s raining, or whether it’s hot, we don’t care. We just go.”
The pair with the help of volunteers have served more than 152,000 home-cooked meals across the Metro in three years. The team makes the meals and then travels to shelters, bus stops, and city streets giving them to those in need.
“We all need hope to go on,” Khan’s wife, Farah Alam of the Little Angels Foundation, said. “I think providing that feeling that somebody cares matters a lot.”
Boxes of food continue to fill their house in Clayton along with donations from Starbucks and Panera Bread.
However, the demand is outgrowing their suburban home. The pair said they hope someone can provide them with a space to take the operation to the next level. A 24/7 community kitchen.
“We are desperately in need of space. We don’t have space,” Khan said. “My vision is to have a space where the unhoused community can come and have a meal whether it’s morning, breakfast, lunch, and dinner”
“When we do our meals, they’re done with the same amount of love, passion, skill and ingredients that we do for our own families,” Alam said.
The non-profit was started in 2013 in memory of their late son. In 2018, their mission developed into tackling food insecurity in the area.
“We are blessed with so many things, and they have nothing.”
Khan said a woman recently reached out to him to say thank you for helping her while she was down on her luck and sleeping in a car with her partner in Downtown St. Louis.
“She sent me a message. She said, ‘Riz for the past month you’ve been taking care of us, and now we have a job. We don’t need food anymore.’”
“These people have so much love,” Alam said. “It changes you inside, and I think all of us need that.”
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