The Second Harvest Culinary Training Program is expanding its offerings to give people a new track to success.
On a Monday morning inside the kitchen at Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, a small group of students enrolled in the Culinary Training Program are learning how to prepare a new dish. Chefs guide students through preparing vichyssoise, a French potato soup, and sole meunière, a fish dish that’s thought to be a great starting point for beginners.
Kalei Trojan moves from station to station in the large prep kitchen, practicing knife skills, food prep, and building confidence to work in a professional kitchen. The recent graduate of the Second Harvest program is back in this kitchen to talk to Central Florida Public Media.
She says the path to a culinary career hasn’t been easy, but this free program gave her everything she needed.
“When I first came in, I didn't have the funds or anything to make a career yet, and then eventually they gave me that push and that help to get through,” she says.
For Kalei, graduating from the Culinary Training Program changed her life. She now spends her days working in professional kitchens at popular Central Florida theme parks. Her story is what Second Harvest hopes to create more of with its 16-week continuing education program that has helped more than 530 graduates with a 95% job placement rate.
It’s gotten support from partners like Bank of America where Jodie Hardman is Senior Vice President and Central Florida Market Executive.
“We've been invested since the first day we knew that they were going to create a program that was going to provide that training, those skills that were necessary, to provide adults with the opportunity to have a career, a sustainable living wage, and to have a future, not only for themselves, but for their families,” says Hardman.
Hardman says the culinary training also supports the company’s work when it hires caterers for events.
At Second Harvest, Director of Culinary Programs Keonna Yearwood-Branch says the work shows food insecurity is about more than distribution.
“When we're talking about the root causes of hunger, we're talking about poverty,” she says. “Students that are coming to us are looking to increase their wages. They're looking to have more access, they're looking for the ability to become more stable in their finances.”
The mission is expanding. Second Harvest conducted a workforce report to better understand what job seekers and employers need most and found a growing demand for customer service roles. This week, they launched a new customer service training track to expand workforce programs beyond the kitchen and into new career paths.
