LIVES Food Truck "OOPEN"

Thanks to all your support, food truck “OOPEN" has been able to operate for three days a week, giving job opportunities to 7 persons with disabilities.
We are able to give opportunities to volunteers to cook with people with disabilities and to sell lunch boxes with people with disabilities.
This has given motivation and hope for all people involved.

This food truck project started after the first LIVES TOKYO 2017 event, with a passionate wish, to promote employment for people with disabilities.
Since then, in 2018, we went to different events and served food to raise awareness of a great model case where people with different abilities work together.
Our goal was to be able to sell at universities, involving university student volunteers.

From April 2019, we started to sell at two universities, Meiji University and Showa Women’s University, on Thursdays and Fridays.  Cooking was done on Wednesdays.
For some students, it was their first time to work and communicate with people with disabilities.  But through working together, we all bonded and became a team.
After all, we are all humans with different abilities.  By focusing on what each person can do and what each person is good at, we learned that we can start and create
something fun and meaningful.

From last October, we have been talking with the social welfare organisation in the community, called “Ancienne AI” to see if we can work together.
Ancienne AI operates a french restaurant, and they work with many people with disabilities in the Setagaya-ku community.  We wanted to work closely with them to expand
our sources of people we can involve, and finally came to an agreement to work in collaboration from April 2020.  An amazing progress.

Hands On Tokyo LIVES - Universities and students  - Community - People with Disabilities.  Collaboration between these four sectors will expand the opportunities to create awareness as well as to hire more people with disabilities from the community.  Hands On Tokyo can now start to bring companies into this collaboration to support the employment opportunities.

February and March are spring break months for the universities, thus it is for planning, putting together structures, and coming up with new menus.
Although March events have been cancelled due to the corona virus incident, we look forward to operating again in April, when the new school year starts here in Japan.

This food truck project can only continue with the support of all the donors like you!
It needs funding to sustain maintenance and cost of the food truck, and we need your continued support.

With your donation, we will eventually be able to expand the operation to longer hours, and to different areas.

Thank you so much!!