Nourish is happy to introduce our new Peterborough Culinary Collaborative! With the generous support of the United Way of Peterborough and District’s Innovation Fund, we will pilot a new collaborative to train 14 women so that they can access meaningful and stable employment, and become food secure. This project will be grounded in our learning from the Newcomer Kitchen Peterborough, our partnership with the New Canadians Centre from 2017 to 2019.
Women who are already strong cooks, but who are facing barriers to employment due to migration, poverty, criminal records, or discrimination, will have the opportunity to scale up their cooking and gain employment readiness skills in order to access secure and meaningful jobs within the food industry. We know that the food industry generates precarious jobs. Therefore, we plan to equip participants with the tools and knowledge they need to access employment in areas of the food industry that pay living wages.
To help participants to succeed at accessing higher paid jobs, we will integrate knowledge and skills for preparing plant-based meals into the regular culinary training. Nourish has extensive experience in this area and we know that these skills will be in higher demand as we move towards finding new ways to mitigate the climate crisis. Knowing how to prepare healthy and tasty plant-based dishes is a skill that is not widely shared in institutional settings yet. We are confident that this added component of the training will provide participants with increased qualifications for securing good jobs. Along with these culinary skills, the training will also include soft skills development such as communicating for success, professional workplace expectations, employment rights, and health and safety in the workplace.
The collaborative nature of the Newcomer Kitchen greatly benefited that project. Because we were able to accomplish so much more together than separately, we will anchor this new project in an even larger collaborative framework by bringing together agencies, employment resources, and members of the private sector.
Collaborators include:
Nourish (YWCA Peterborough Haliburton)
New Canadians Centre
Elizabeth Fry Society of Peterborough
Nogojiwanong Friendship Centre
Employment Planning and Counselling
Peterborough Public Health
