Social Change

Training Programs Invite Diverse Groups of Cooks Into the Kitchen

| ChrisHardmanWriter

MADISON, WISCONSIN-BASED Chef Jonny Hunter has a passion for hand-crafted, local food. The charcuterie produced by his company Underground Meats has won three Good Food Awards. His meat-centered restaurant, Forequarter, was nominated as one of the best new restaurants of 2013by Bon Appétit, and he was nominated for “Best Chef: Midwest” Semifinals of 2017 by the James Beard Foundation.

With all this success, it’s hard to believe that he can’t find enough cooks to staff his kitchen.

“Casual fine-dining places have been opening with much more frequency,” Hunter said. “After the industry started to grow, [our] labor supply dried up pretty quickly.”

Amid historically low unemployment in Wisconsin and around the country, it’s perhaps no surprise that finding kitchen help is a major challenge for restaurants. But widespread employment isn’t evenly distributed—many minority populations still face chronic unemployment. To address that unemployment crisis, and to build a more diverse workforce, Hunter reached out to people who were systematically under-employed. In 2014, he joined with two other like-minded individuals, Matt Feifarek of Slow Food Madison and Chandra Miller Fienen of Starting Block Madison, to form FoodWorks Madison.

At the top of their agenda was to develop First Course, a job-training program tailored to produce cooks ready for a kitchen job in three weeks. Their first cohort graduated in May of 2017. “We really want to make it so that our student [can] apply for a job on a Tuesday and be useful on a busy Friday night shift,” Feifarek said.

A Nationwide Cook Shortage

In addition to Madison, restaurants in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and other cities around the country are also struggling to fill their kitchens with cooks. The low wages and long hours the restaurant industry is known for make recruiting cooks difficult. Although some restaurants have increased wages and benefits, the need for cooks still outnumbers the supply.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for cooks is expected to steadily increase as new restaurants continue to open and people continue eating out. Although the overall demand for cooks in schools, hospitals and cafeterias is expected to grow by 6 percent from 2016 to 2026, the growth for restaurant cooks is expected to grow by 12 percent. That means the U.S. restaurant industry will need a total of 1,377,200 cooks in 2026 compared to 1,231,900 cooks employed in 2016.

To fill this need, leaders in the food industry are taking a more active approach to staffing their kitchens. Instead of waiting for the cooks to come to them, they are recruiting people to complete low-cost or free training programs with a job opportunity as the end result.

Culinary Training Programs Across the U.S.

Programs in Boston, Cincinnati, Maryland, and most recently Chicago are tapping into a long-ignored labor pool to fill the city’s kitchens. Cincinnati COOKS! is a free culinary training program that has graduated more than 1,400 formerly under- and unemployed people, including recovering addicts, veterans, and chronically unemployed adults.

The curriculum, developed by the Freestone Food Bank, includes life skills training such as job interview techniques to help students succeed both in and out of the kitchen. War veteran and recovering addict Adam McKinney joined the program straight from rehab.

“The leadership that is around here, and the way they go about doing things, keeps all of us motivated,” he said.

Within a year of completing the program, 80 percent of the graduates find jobs in the food industry or start a continuing-education program such as Cincinnati State’s Culinary Management program.

The Maryland Food Bank runs FoodWorks, a 12-week culinary training program for low-income individuals in conjunction with the Community College of Baltimore County. Students learn basic culinary techniques, professionalism, and food safety while they prepare meals for their hungry neighbors.

And in October, celebrity chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless announced that he is launching a culinary training program for low-income students at a food-and-beverage incubator called The Hatchery on Chicago’s West Side.

“I believe this program can help surmount two big challenges in the city—lack of cooks to fill our restaurants’ kitchens and a lack of both solid preparation and career opportunities for the youth of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods,” Bayless said in a statement.

At Bayless’ program, high school- and college-age students will pay a minimal fee to learn basic culinary skills from Chicago chefs and then head to internships at Chicago’s best restaurant groups.

In Madison, An Open-Source Journey

The FoodWorks Madison crew completed their first job-training program in 2017. Feifarek describes First Course as “not a cooking school or a culinary school—this is a get-a-job school.” To develop the curriculum, FoodWorks worked with chefs and kitchen managers, community agencies, and an educator from the University of Wisconsin.

Supported in part by a $10,000 grant from the city of Madison, FoodWorks was able to rent a kitchen, hire teachers, buy ingredients, and give $1,000 to each graduate of the program. “It went awesome. We learned a lot in the process,” Hunter said. “We were very pleasantly surprised to find out that our idea worked.”

Feifarek said FoodWorks places heavy emphasis on job placement, inviting business owners and managers to come and talk to students. So far, the approach has proven successful: three of the four First Course students are working full-time at jobs that pay at least $14 an hour. “It’s a nice move for employers because they can use us as references,” Feifarek said. “We hope that one of the ways it will work is lowering hiring risk for a small business.”

In June, FoodWorks raised $56,500 through Kickstarter to develop the program further. The plan is to increase the training to 10 sessions a year with 20 students in each course.

Once their program model is more finely tuned, FoodWorks will open-source First Course so other communities around the country can replicate and build on their success.

That way, restaurants looking for cooks and workers looking for jobs will have more opportunities to find each other. “I love it when you can use one problem to solve another,” said Feifarek.

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman 

All photos courtesy of Matt Feifarek.

Detroit Food Academy Prepares Teens for Jobs

| ChrisHardmanWriter

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Hassan Amaleki is on the fast track to a successful career in the food industry. By the time he graduated from high school in 2015, Amaleki had worked for a thriving food business, completed an entrepreneurial training program, and led the launch of a successful new product.

Amaleki gained these experiences through the Detroit Food Academy (DFA), an after-school training program for high school kids ages 13-20 that gives young people hands-on, real world experiences in developing, marketing, and selling artisan food products. Students work with mentor businesses, including Slow Jams, Friends of Detroit Potato Chips, Cynt-Sational Popcorn, and Brooklyn Street Local, to learn culinary and business skills.

After completing the 25-week program, graduates earn a certificate in food entrepreneurship, and have access to a network of potential employers and an opportunity to enter a summer employment program. Best of all, the program is completely free.

The unemployment rate among Detroit youth is alarmingly high at 30 percent compared to the city-wide unemployment rate of 6.5 percent. While the DFA has only just begun to track the activities of their 800 graduates, they do know that of the 44 students who completed the past two summer programs, 90 percent were hired by their mentors or the DFA. That’s 40 young people with new jobs.

“That confidence our students are building is our main focus,” says DFA Executive Director Jen Rusciano. “Food is just the [most fun] way to do that.” Rusciano, along with Noam Kimelman and Amy Berkhoudt, founded the DFA at Detroit’s Cesar Chavez High School in 2011.

During the school year, the DFA runs as an after-school club that meets 1-2 days a week for a few hours. Hassan Amaleki joined when he was in ninth grade. “I found a program where I can make a whole bunch of different kinds of great food,” Amaleki says. “From then on I [thought], ‘wow this is a great program; I got to stick with it.’”

The DFA offers their program at eight high schools around Detroit, and around 200 students have joined the DFA this year. DFA staff use portable equipment to turn classrooms into kitchens for cooking demos and workshops. The meetings themselves are often driven by student interest. For example Amaleki loves preparing pasta dishes. “We always cook and we always eat,” says Rusciano.

At the beginning of the year, the students use a budget to plan field trips. DFA students have visited Detroit’s Eastern Market, one of the largest historic markets in the country; D-Town farm, an eight-acre urban farm run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network; and small businesses, such as Sister Pie on the city’s East Side.

In the summer, the students work as interns with Detroit food companies, where they can pursue either a culinary or entrepreneurial path. “We try to walk the mentees through every aspect of running a business,” says Shannon Byrne, a DFA board member and the owner of Slow Jams in Detroit, where Amaleki worked. Byrne has been hosting DFA students since the program began. The students work with her on food production, selling at markets, sourcing ingredients, budgeting, inventory, and bookkeeping. Byrne sees the partnership as benefiting her business as well as the students.

“Teenagers come into an experience with a different perspective,” she says. “Some of the questions mentees have asked over the years really help you reflect on your own business and your values in your business.”

Students commit to one day a week with their food mentors. Amaleki learned to keep moving while at Slow Jams. “They taught me to get work done right away,” he says.

“We make it pretty clear that the students are there to both learn and help,” Rusciano says. “We only reach out to food businesses that have a triple bottom line vision, folks who see themselves contributing to the foundation of a broader community in addition to having a great business.”

In 2015, DFA launched Small Batch Detroit to give students more real world experience and to generate revenue outside of the grants that fund the program. Amaleki was part of a group of students that developed the DFA debut product called Mitten Bites, no-bake granola snacks with dark chocolate, peanut butter, and dried fruit. “We did a lot of research on it before we made it,” Amaleki says. “It’s something almost everybody has had before. Somebody’s mom or grandma made an energy bite that was also a snack.”

Mitten Bites have taken off. They are for sale at 30 locations, including the Eastern Market and Whole Foods. Once a week, Small Batch Director Jacob Schoenknecht, Amaleki, VISTA service member Margo Dalal and DFA students produce Mitten Bites in a rented commercial kitchen. The team recently doubled their production level from two batches of 600 bites each to four.

In addition to working in food, DFA graduates have gone on to pursue careers in fields such as education and nursing. And their experience with the DFA has given them an important head start. “It’s transformative,” Byrne says. “We can see the impact on all of the students that come through.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

An Urban Farmer Breaks New Ground in Flint

| ChrisHardmanWriter

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Roxanne Adair is a trailblazer. In 2010, she and a friend started Flint River Farm in Flint, Michigan, a city where urban farming isn’t the norm. Adair’s background was in fisheries, wildlife, and biology, and she used the knowledge gained working at the Genesee County Land bank to buy and rent city lots, totaling nearly three acres, in the heart of Flint.

This process wasn’t easy. Flint’s history mirrors that of other rust belt cities. The city had a robust economy based in the auto industry until it began to decline in the 1970s. When General Motors closed multiple plants and cut thousands of jobs in Flint in 1989, work suddenly became scarce. As unemployment and crime increased, the media dubbed Flint “the Murder Capital” of the U.S.

Despite the city’s challenges, Adair and her partner jump-started their business with a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation. Their goal was to create a sustainable business model for urban farming in Flint.

The farmers built hoop houses, produced enough vegetables to supply a multi-family community supported agriculture program (CSA), harvested honey from two beehives, and even tapped neighborhood maple trees to make syrup. They sold their organically grown produce at the Flint Farmers’ Market.

Since her partner left in 2012, Adair has continued to expand the farm on her own, and the space now occupies 17 city lots. Flint River Farm produces a wide array of heirloom crops, including apples, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, corn, melons, tomatoes, squash, dried beans, carrots, beets and Brussels sprouts—the list goes on and on.

frf joannas dadWhile Flint River Farm is filled with fresh produce, the neighborhood still faces its challenges. Across the street is a burned-out convenience store. The main drag, Saginaw Street, is a block away and is home to strip clubs, a pawn shop, and a liquor store.

Theft is a frequent problem on the farm, but Adair doesn’t begrudge her hungry visitors. “If you need [food] bad enough to steal it, you need it more than I do,” she says. But, she encourages people to reach out to her first: “Tell me and I will harvest it for you. I’ll wash it for you and have it ready.”

Vandals also come through the farm regularly, slashing the thick polyethylene walls of the hoop houses or spray painting gang paraphernalia on the sides. Repairs and replacements can cost thousands of dollars.

By and large, however, the long-time residents of the neighborhood have become Adair’s friends. They share tools, talk over the tomatoes, and collaborate on composting. Adair recalls that when she started the farm, she rarely saw the neighbors outside. “They would mow their lawn and then run back inside,” she says. Now people have planted flowers and are taking pride in their landscape. “I can’t take credit for that,” says Adair, “but I think [the farm] has caused people to come outside more and not hate their surroundings.”

Throughout the year, Adair shares her knowledge through community workshops, on topics as diverse as urban foraging, composting, maple syrup making, organic gardening, and season extension. Although she charges a small fee for the classes, Adair admits that she doesn’t turn anyone away. “There is a spirit in the city of Flint that I haven’t found anywhere else,” she says. “The people who have stayed have been through some really hard times. I have a respect for the struggle.”

Flint River Farm aims to address the city’s high unemployment rate by providing jobs to Flint residents. Using grant money, Adair hired local teenagers to farm and work at the farmers’ market. At the height of the growing season, she employed nine full-time staff members and two interns. As the farm moves toward self-sustainability, Adair hopes these jobs will become more permanent. When the farm first started, it was entirely grant-funded. This year grants accounted for only 40 percent of the operating costs.

To sustain the farm, Adair has diversified her product line. She has sold lip balm made from her bees’ wax, salad mixes from the hoop house, teas from dried herbs, eggs from her small flock of chickens, and nut butters she grinds herself. This month, she began selling bulk dried goods like organic oats and flour at her stand in the market. “I am confident that with bulk food bins we will be sustainable next year,” she says.

Last summer, the city threatened to confiscate the chickens Adair keeps at her house. Flint’s Blight Authority gave her 30 days to dispose of the birds. Adair used that opportunity to try to change a 1968 city ordinance that prohibits residential homeowners from keeping “fowl” on their property. She mobilized her support network, worked with the city council, and created a ”Friends of Flint Chickens” Facebook campaign.

On the last day, Adair sat on her front porch and waited for the police to come. She highly doubted that in a city with only three police officers on duty at a time, one of them would take time away from chasing drug dealers and thieves, to chase her chickens. She waited all day. No one came.

Like her chickens, Roxanne Adair is in Flint to stay.

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