Cooking Matters Virtual Volunteer Culinary Instructor (New Hampshire)

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Are you passionate about food? Creating delicious, nutritious low-cost meals and sharing your expertise? Ensuring access to healthy foods for low-income families?

Then becoming a Cooking Matters(r) NH Virtual Volunteer Culinary Instructor might be for you!

Cooking Matters(r) in New Hampshire is hosted by the New Hampshire Food Bank and is a cooking-based nutrition education course that empowers low-income families with the confidence and skills to prepare healthy, tasty meals on a limited budget. Professional chefs and nutrition educators volunteer their time and expertise to lead hands-on courses that show parents and caregivers how to purchase and prepare nutritious foods in healthful, safe, and tasty ways. This can mean the difference between feeding families for just one night and making sure they have the knowledge, skills, and resources to prepare healthy meals for a lifetime.

Cooking Matters(r) virtual classes meet for one hour on Zoom and are team-taught by a volunteer chef and nutrition educator. Lessons cover meal preparation, grocery shopping, food budgeting and nutrition. During each workshop, participants will watch a live cooking demo provided by the Culinary Instructor. Through this they gain confidence to practice fundamental food skills including proper knife techniques, reading ingredient labels, and making a healthy meal for a family of four on a $10 budget after attending class.

Instructors are supported with a myriad of resources from Cooking Matters(r) including the recipe, lesson plans, and outlines from an established curriculum.

Responsibilities:

• Teach 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. Use a learner-centered approach.

• Facilitate class discussions 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.
• Each class choose recipes to prepare for the cooking demo to reinforce workshop goals.
• Reinforce messaging of nutrition instructor.
• Responsible for grocery shopping, demo prep and instructing cooking demo over Zoom.

Recommended Skills/Experience:

• Professional culinary training or experience working in the food industry is helpful but not required.
• Interest and comfort in working with low-income individuals from diverse backgrounds.
• Comfortable speaking in from of groups.
• Willingness to be trained on CM curricula, education approach, to work as a team with volunteer nutrition educator, and to adhere to program policies and team decisions.
• Experience with Zoom a plus, but not required. We have Zoom guides if needed.

Time Commitment:

• At least 1 hour for training and orientation to Cooking Matters through an online training.
• At least 1.5 to 2 hours per workshop for cooking demo preparation, travel time to store, class time, set-up and clean-up.
• Shadow a current Cooking Matters course to better understand instructor role.

If interested contact Maria Smith - Cooking Matters NH Coordinator at msmith@nhfoodbank.org