Say goodbye to trays, buffets, and waiting in lines to eat at a regular old soup kitchen.
When you step inside the Kansas City Community Kitchen today, a greeter shows you to a table. Volunteer waitstaff takes your order after you’ve had time to look at the menu and see what the culinary team has been cookin’ up. The options are healthier and quite creative, like an episode of Food Network’s “Chopped,” but with the ingredients available to the kitchen that day.
Diners are encouraged to leave reviews of their service and requests for what they’d like to see on the menu. Have health, dietary, or religious-observance needs? No sweat.
“We are trying to flip the photo of what a soup kitchen looks like,” Mandy Caruso-Yahne, director of community engagement at Episcopal Community Services (ECS), told Upworthy.
But feeding those in need isn’t the only way the kitchen is helping. They’re training others too.
Through the program, students work their way up to cooking in the kitchen and providing suggestions for the menu and dishes they prepare. They develop knowledge and confidence in a variety of ways that help them continue down a path in the food industry once they’re finished with the program.
As one diner named Brian put it,
“They’re treating me good, like they don’t know I’m homeless.”
We were practicing mock interviews, 30 minutes, one-on-ones between working designers and senior students. Going over their portfolios, asking questions, and providing feedback.
Giving them a chance to practice in a safe environment before they went out into the real world.
We assume that once you graduate, your license to be a student expires. It’s the logic that because I’m getting paid, I’m a professional, and if I’m a professional, I’m not a student. It’s appears to be a linear path. We look at schools as factories that take in students and spit out professionals.
Once we chuck that graduation cap in the sky, our self-perception shifts along with it in a one way street.
The irony of school is that it’s meant to prepare you to be a professional for the rest of your life. But what if instead we were prepared to be students for life?
The freedom to explore and experiment are critical to how we learn. So how do you keep that spirit?
If school was a playground to experiment and learn, then we need to find an equivalent playground and playmates after we graduate. And find it whether it’s a physical, digital, or psychological space.
“The kids have moved out. It’s like we were in a routine for twenty-five years, and now it’s come to an end. Suddenly it’s just the two of us. There’s nothing else to focus on. It’s been a rediscovery process. So we just bought some hiking backpacks. We’re going travel the world, and we’re not planning ahead.”
