Cooking Matters Volunteer Opportunities: Culinary Instructor

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Cooking Matters challenges families to take health into their own hands, empowering them to learn and grow with others in their community. All volunteers not only have the power to educate, but they inadvertently increase self-esteem and strengthen social networks. Your time and contributions help create a long-term solution to hunger by giving families the confidence and ability to be more self-sufficient, improve their eating habits and food budgeting skills.

The volunteer culinary instructor will serve as a teacher and role model, teaching key culinary skills and inspiring participants to cook healthier, inexpensive meals at home.

Responsibilities:

• Teach low-income participants the basics of food and kitchen safety, food preparation and making healthy choices and substitutions when cooking according to the highlighted objectives of each lesson.
• Facilitate class discussion on each cooking or food safety message, allowing participants to brainstorm how they might put new behaviors into action, discuss barriers to adopting new behaviors and share ideas with their peers for overcoming barriers.
• Work with the course team to choose appropriate recipes from the Cooking Matters curriculum or their own that still adhere to Cooking Matters criteria.
• Assign participants kitchen tasks that allow each individual to gain hands-on practice and improve their cooking skills.
• Supervise participants in the kitchen, encouraging proper technique and gently correcting as needed.

Skills/Experience:

• We welcome qualified chefs, instructors and students from culinary schools, personal chefs, caterers, home economics teachers, non-profit kitchen managers and retired foodservice professionals. Conversely, if you are a home cook passionate about food and comfortable with instructing others, we welcome you!
• Interest in working with low-income individuals of diverse backgrounds.
• Comfort speaking in front of audiences (average class size is 12 participants).
• Ability to travel to class location.
• Willingness to be trained on Cooking Matters curricula, to work as a team and to adhere to program policies and team decisions.

Time Commitment:

• Attend 1 Cooking Matters Volunteer Orientation and Training session.
• Approximately 3 hours per week for bin pick up, travel time, class time, set-up and clean-up.
• Must commit to all six weeks of the course or share the commitment with a colleague.