Café Hope - Hospital hospitality
Emmie’s Kitchen was created after Eve Naraynsingh’s daughter, Emmie, was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia at the age of eight. It started as a single home-cooked meal for families once a month at The Manchester Children's hospital, and is now into a volunteer-led service delivering on average 130 hot meals three to four weeks each month.
Recorded at the Hay Festival, Eve tells Rachel how other parents responded to her home cooking that she was bringing in for her family, and how it inspired her to extend the care to other people who were in the same position.
Café Hope is our virtual Radio 4 coffee shop, where guests pop in for a brew and a chat to tell us what they're doing to make things better in big and small ways. Think of us as sitting in your local café, cooking up plans, hearing the gossip, and celebrating the people making the world a better place.
We're all about trying to make change. It might be a transformational project that helps an entire community, or it might be about trying to make one life a little bit easier. And the key here is in the trying. This is real life. Not everything works, and there are struggles along the way. But it's always worth a go.
You can contact us on cafehope@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Rachel Burden
Series Producer: Uma Doraiswamy
Sound Design: Cameron Ward
Editor: Tom Bigwood
Published on Monday, 7th September 2026.
Available Podcasts from Café Hope
We are not the BBC, we only list available podcasts. To find out more about the programme including episodes available on BBC iPlayer, go to the Café Hope webpage.