In March 2025, during my school’s Beyond Project at Hangzhou CIS, Elyse and I set out to do what many high schoolers love doing: rate food on Instagram. But our teachers challenged us—our idea was fun, but where was the real community impact? Thus, we thought to ourselves: How could food be more than content?

That question took us to Shanghai, where we began seeking out small, local restaurants representing underrepresented cultures and communities. Talking to cooks and owners, we realised that food was a vessel for home. Behind every dish was a story from home.

Growing up in Hong Kong as a Korean teenager, I knew what it felt like to live in a crowded city and still feel like an outsider. But that ache of isolation is infinitely deeper for Hong Kong’s foreign domestic workers. Every Sunday, they gather across the city's footbridges—foreign by law, yet intimately domestic in the daily lives of the families they care for. They raise us, nourish us, and keep our homes running, yet they often remain invisible, kept at a distance by language and social barriers.

If words fail to bridge that divide, food never does. You don’t need a shared language to understand the care folded into a dumpling or the solace held in a warm bowl of soup.

In May 2025, inspired by these realisations, I founded 4HOME to turn food from a simple craving into a movement of empathy and connection.

Through free community cooking workshops, storytelling initiatives, and local partnerships, domestic workers and migrant community members step out of service roles to become what they truly are: storytellers and chefs. In our kitchens, local teenagers and workers stand side-by-side. The true measure of 4HOME is the look on someone’s face when a single bite carries them, even for a moment, all the way home.

Food taught me that "home" was never just a physical place. It is the feeling of being understood, seen, and fed—in every sense of the word.

Thank you for being here and pulling up a chair to our table.

— Haru Kim, Founder of 4HOME