The Charlestown Public Kitchen (known as the Boyce Community Kitchen)  builds off a 1 year long co-design project (2023-2024) with the Harvest On Vine Food Pantry (HOVFP), which sought to explore the future of food pantries as more than just transactional spaces. The community identified that HOVFP needed to be more culturally appropriate items, to meet its clients with more dignity, and improve its service design, which were all accomplished during that year. It also needed to utilize its community spaces more effectively, focusing on community-led third spaces. What we identified as a community was the need for a Public Kitchen on the first floor of the pantry, coupled with a cookbook library, recipe wall, oral histories nook, and ample flex space for other types of programming. We opened the Charlestown Public Kitchen in collaboration with HOVFP (the only food pantry in Charlestown) which is located just feet away from the Bunker Hill Housing Development in Spring 2025. It will serve a vast swath of different populations within Charlestown, including many food insecure folks already utilizing the pantry, K-12 students (there’s a school across the street), university students (Bunker Hill Community College within walking distance), generally Charlestown residents, unhoused folks, new arrivals, among many others. When we say public, we mean it! The goal is to create more resilient neighborhoods by utilizing food as a catalyst for social change, togetherness, collaboration, and overall beautiful moments filled with love, joy, and care. We are reimagining existing community assets into resilient and sustainable hubs for community members, never forgetting that the root cause of food insecurity is poverty and years of racist practices. This third space will remain for the use of community members for the foreseeable future with a great partner as a backbone and site for this intervention.