Building a Community Kitchen

View Our Community Kitchen Video!

Our Navigation Approach

To prepare vulnerable students for success in school and in life, children and families in our community need comprehensive, collaborative programs to tackle to barriers of poverty – including barriers to equitable education and healthy lives. Navigation, our groundbreaking, holistic approach, extends health and social services to students within our academic programs, and expands supports to the whole family.

○ Integrated within this approach is our comprehensive Edible Education Food Literacy initiative, addressing chronic food insecurity faced by families with:

• “Cooking Matters” and Nutrition Education classes (800 participants, including special classes for families to learn together)
• Gardens and Greenhouses to support learning, growing and food (100 participants)
• Family Dinners that facilitate community connections and healthy eating (200 participants)
• Emergency Food Support that includes weekly food backpacks and food baskets home (250 students)

○ Young children and families and college and career-bound teens work with our Navigators, Foodlink educators, and community partners on nutrition education and job-training for careers in Culinary Arts fields.

○ To further enhance Navigation’s food literacy and career-readiness initiatives, we are building a Community Kitchen. A learning hub and resource for our student and family programming, the kitchen will:

• Boast 7 cooking stations, equipped with ranges and microwaves
• Support our unique food literacy curriculum created with Foodlink
• Accommodate learning for more than 15 students and family members at a time
• Expand current class offerings of our Edible Education classes from four to eight session per year
• Support job-readiness training in culinary arts for teens
• Host a visiting chef series for students to interact with professionals in the culinary field.
• Integrate teaching garden and greenhouses using the crops grown in the MyPlate Teaching Garden on The Sands Family Campus

Community financial and in-kind support for our Community Kitchen will help expand programs, purchase educational supplies, food pantry items, and cooking equipment for seven work stations. Naming and underwriting opportunities are available.