Growing Chefs! Ontario Community Vitality Update
Growing Chefs! Ontario Community Vitality Update
Growing Chefs! Ontario provides cooking programs and food system learning to children and young people across London, using food to apply classroom knowledge and teach subjects such as science, math, history, and geography in a way that’s applicable to everyday life.
In 2020, Growing Chefs! was granted a $250,000 Community Vitality Grant from LCF’s unrestricted Community Fund to increase the number of people who could benefit from the program. “What’s been happening over the past three years is the demand for our programming has far exceeded our capacity to deliver it,” said Executive Director, Andrew Fleet, speaking in 2020.
The funds granted were to be spent over three years on resources and equipment that would increase their capacity, with much of the funding going towards securing and furnishing their new space at The Grove - Western Fair District’s agri-business hub where partners can share resources, space, and connections. This new space has increased capacity for Growing Chefs!, so now up to 80 young people can cook together. Money has also been spent on building a heated greenhouse and developing learning gardens, which teach children where food comes from and gives them an appreciation for how it grows. During times when indoor programming wasn’t possible, the greenhouse and outdoor learning gardens provided new learning and volunteering opportunities that were both impactful and safe.
Since receiving funding, Growing Chefs! has been a consultant to the Ministry of Education for incorporating food literacy into the updated science curriculum for grades 1-9, which launched across Ontario in September 2022. The investment in staffing enabled by the Community Vitality grant has also meant that Growing Chefs! could create lesson plans and training resources related to this new curriculum, which are set to be used in schools early in 2023.
Innovative work like this has been crucial in staying connected with children and young people throughout the pandemic. “The primary challenges encountered through this project have been as a result of the pandemic, which has impacted our ability to work directly with children and families,” says Andrew. “We have had to rebuild our operational systems from the ground up, and learn to adapt our programming on the fly in order to still connect with and support our participants.”
Since 2020, Growing Chefs! has been partnered with the Ontario Student Nutrition Program S.W. Region (OSNP) to deliver meals to families in need when the pandemic forced the closure of breakfast, lunch, and snack programs. “For the past three summers we have provided healthy meals to over 90 families each week, all delivered directly to their homes/school pick-up points,” Andrew tells us. “This partnership has grown to include a fresh-food box program, where all of the food grown in the new greenhouse and learning gardens is harvested, packaged, and delivered to families in need. We are currently providing approximately 25 families with fresh food boxes twice per month throughout the year. This partnership has been so successful that the OSNP supported the pilot of our Garden programming with a one-time grant of $10,000.”
Other partnerships have also grown in recent years, with another example being Thames Valley District School Board now funding student fees for all of Growing Chefs! school-based programming for the 2022-23 school year, an agreement worth over $20,000. This partnership started when Growing Chefs! hosted professional development days for science and experiential learning educators at the new premises at The Grove.
Despite all the challenges the past couple of years has brought, the impact of Growing Chefs! continues, and they’re still on track to achieve all they set out to achieve when they were given the grant. “Things are staying remarkably in-line with our project plan, all things considered,” says Andrew.
Throughout the constant shifts in how Growing Chefs! was able to connect with young people, the quality of the programming has always been at the forefront of Andrew’s mind. “We often talk about impact in terms of the number of people reached, but we all know there is so much more to measuring impact than just numbers on a page. It’s about quantity and quality,” Andrew told us.
This clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed by the young people they work with. Cornerstone Alternative Education Centre and School Within a College, both groups that work with high school-aged, at-risk youth for whom the conventional school system just doesn’t work, have been working with Growing Chefs! for a couple of years now. Jenn Gilbert, an instructor with School Within a College, recently shared that “Growing Chefs is the best program partnership every year for our youth participants. The staff are fantastic (knowledgeable, personable, and caring), the skills and knowledge the kids learn are relevant and interesting, and the food is delicious!"
For more information on Growing Chefs! Ontario, visit their website.
