A Very Special Class

Congratulations to Antonio, Christine, Latoya, and Monique! This was our 64^th graduating class from the Culinary Job Training Program, but everyone seemed to agree – this class was special. Due to the wild weather we’ve had this winter, they persevered through the class for 12 weeks rather than the usual 11. The students both supported and challenged each other to keep improving and keep going, even when it wasn’t easy. Chef Khaleel even noted, “This class is probably this hardest working class since I’ve been here.”

At IFFS, we know that lack of income is one of the primary root causes of hunger. Without a job that provides sufficient income, it’s hard to buy enough food for a healthy and active life. Without a set of employable skills, finding a job is an uphill battle. But last Friday, four individuals entered the job market ready for steady employment in food service, trained in culinary skills AND life skills by Inter-Faith Food Shuttle’s Culinary Job Training Program.

Many students have faced severe life challenges that have previously kept them unemployed or under employed. But the class prepares students for self-sufficiency. Not only do they learn knife skills, equipment identification, cooking terminology and techniques, and proper sanitation, they also learn life and employment skills from our social worker, Sharon Mitchell, and other guest trainers.

David, from InterAct, spoke to the graduates on Friday, reminding them that “It’s not just about the food you interact with. It’s not just about the cooking utensils you interact with. It’s also about the people that you interact with.”

Graduation is also an emotional time, and students reflect on their journey to be standing their holding their certificates.

“I did this class to show my kids – if I can make a change, they can make a change,” Antonio told the audience of family, friends, and supporters gathered in celebration on Friday.

“When I started this, I had a lot of different things going on. I needed a change….This has been a blessing, having a second chance,” said Latoya.

During the course, students got a lesson from Carmela of Melina’s Pasta – and they felt so inspired that they chose “Italy in Springtime” as a theme for the graduation lunch menu (which serves as their final test). They made the pasta fresh themselves, including Artichoke and Spinach Ravioli, Sundried Tomato Gnocchi Romaine, and Florentina Spinach Fettucini!

Other items on the menu chosen and prepared by the students included:

• Mozarella Crostinis w/ Assorted Provencale Toppings
• Rosemary Sage Freekeh & Basmati Rice Salad
• Italian White Bean Salad
• Tuscan Penne Pasta Salad
• Familia-Romagna 7 Bean & Vegetable Salad
• Grilled Mediterranean Vegetable Platter
• 3 sauces for their freshly made pasta: alfredo, rose cream, and pomoporo sauce
• And for dessert: chocolate cake with raspberry chipotle filling!

During their time with IFFS, culinary job training program students are not just learning – they’re also giving back. Their everyday work in preparing meal is absolutely integral to our hunger-relief efforts. In 2013, our food service team produced 102,443 meals for children, families, and agencies in our commercial kitchen. These students were a part of that.

We wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors, but we know they’ll be fine. Graduates from the program in past two years have an 80% employment rate, and in the audience on Friday were five former graduates, all working and successful, following their dreams. We can’t wait to see what the future has in store for these four!

Cooking Matters for Everyone!

Congratulations to our latest Cooking Matters graduates! A group of participants at Reality Ministries, an organization that serves individuals with developmental disabilities age 14 and older, graduated from our nutrition education course earlier this month with newfound knowledge on how to purchase and prepare nutritious foods in healthful, safe, and tasty ways...on a budget!

This participant in our satellite Cooking Matters class at UNC's Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention brought his granddaughter to graduation.

It's never too early or late to learn to cook!

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Happy Spring from the Teaching Farm!

We have had a gnarly winter here at the Teaching Farm with over 9” of precipitation in the last month, much of it frozen. It has left us scrambling in the mud! Luckily, Spring is finally here, and we are well underway with our spring planting and greenhouse work. We’ve already gotten kale, peas, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, spinach, cauliflower, onions, garlic, and pok choi in the ground. We are looking forward to expanding our asparagus plot this year, planting over 700 new “crowns” this spring. Our chickens have survived cold man winter and are now laying more eggs than ever before. We now have 150 chickens all laying eggs like it’s going out of style!

We have our work cut out for us this Spring catching up from all the rain and cold weather. Work right now consists of building and preparing planting beds, sifting and spreading compost, mulching aisles between beds with leaf mulch, weeding, expanding our deer fencing, and much, much more. Come out and join us at the farm on a regular basis, Tues-Friday from 9am-12pm or 12pm-3pm and Saturdays 9am-1pm. Contact Joshua@FoodShuttle.org to schedule a time.

We recently hosted over 30 hard-working and enthusiastic volunteers from the Jamie Kirk Hahn Foundation, and with their help, we were able to tackle several projects including deer fencing that will protect our new Incubator Farmers from deer as their spring planting goes in this week, as well as spring bed preparation including:

• 1400 row feet of potatoes
• 1200 row feet of cabbage
• 600 row feet of Chinese cabbage
• 600 row feet of broccoli
• 150 row feet of pak choi.
• 12 280-foot rows raked out = 3360 bed feet of planting space prepared!
• 2800 feet of aisles mulched with leaves
• ½ cubic yard of compost sifted
• 3 cubic yards of compost loaded for our Hoke St. location

Don't forget to check out our awesome upcoming agricultural workshops this spring!

Incubator Farm Program

We have 15 Incubator Farmers and are growing! There is still more plot space available at the Teaching Farm. (Update: we are now full for the season!) Check out this flyer with more info and contact Joshua@FoodShuttle.org if you're interested in starting your own Incubator Farm.

Mobile Market provides Fresh Produce, Nutrition Lessons

On a spring-like February day, tables in the community room at Wake Forest Baptist Church were lined with crates of apples, tomatoes,  onions, squash, zucchini,  bananas, strawberries, potatoes (both white and sweet), lettuce, grapes, bread, and baked goods. Volunteers were setting out food from Inter-Faith Food Shuttle for our monthly community Mobile Market at the church– providing good food directly to folks in need. Many waited patiently for the market to begin. One man at the market, Farris Simpson, lost his job four months ago, and his wife, with multiple sclerosis, relies on disability for support.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been to anything like this,” he said. The  reality is that anyone can be affected by hunger and find themselves in need of a little help to make ends meet. And that’s exactly what the market provides. Run once a month by two kind-hearted volunteers from the church,  the market welcomes all folks in need - no questions asked - to get whatever they  need for free.

 Sherrell Seda  is a 44 year old veteran on disability and has two twin 16 year old boys to take care of, Dominique and Demetrius. She says she appreciates the Mobile Market for  the abundance and variety of fruits and vegetables.

“A lot of vegetables and produce we get here, we couldn’t afford at the supermarket.” She lamented that “we just get so busy just trying to fill the children up” that sometimes what’s healthful gets neglected.

Sherrell also welcomes the opportunity to try new things.

“A lot of stuff you can get here, you might never have tried before,” she says. Last month, she got to try a pomegranate for the first time. Her athletic sons are big meat eaters, but she says the vegetables she gets from the mobile market ensure they get other nutrition, too.  She’s thankful to have food to give them energy for their wrestling matches and ballgames.

The help from the market “goes farther than you’d think,” said Sharrell, “it’s like a drop of water falling in a basin, the way it spreads….it’s a blessing.”

Mitch Phillips, referred to the market by Urban Ministries, was there for his first time as well. He said he had a difficult time buying fruits and vegetables with food stamps while trying to make the benefits last the whole month.

“All you can buy is hot dogs and bologna….maybe a roast if it’s marked down three or four times,” he says, shaking his head, “…and then they CUT food stamps!”

The market provides knowledge as well as food. The IFFS Nutrition team shows participants healthful ways to use the produce they get there, providing tips on how to cook healthy on a budget.

This month’s lesson focused on reducing sodium intake, with tips such as not adding salt until you’re at the table and using herbs and spices to add flavor in place of salt.

Participants sampled a healthier version of a comfort-food favorites:  whole-grain mac ‘n’ cheese with broccoli! The nutrition team then compared the ingredient list for this recipe to the ingredient list for Kraft’s boxed macaroni and cheese – which contains higher fat content  (including that nasty trans fat), higher sodium, and way less fiber than the recipe our nutrition team prepared.

“Do you know what Triployphosphate is?” Katherine Moser, IFFS's Nutrition Outreach Coordinator, asks the crowd, “Me neither.”  But all of the ingredients in the whole-grain dish were ones participants could easily find in the grocery store and know how to shop for.

Participants are challenged to "Try it, Share it, Change it" - Try a new food or recipe, Share information or food with a someone you know, or make a small Change in eating and behaviors.

Steady Success and Still Dreaming: CJTP Graduate Janet Hubbard

Our current Culinary Job Training class is a little over a month away from graduation, and we love watching their progress! We recently caught up with a former student and 2004  graduate of the program to see what she's doing now.

What's she doing now?

Janet Hubbard has been working with Centerplate at the Raleigh Convention Center for the last 5 years, and before that, the State Legislature for 4 years.

How what she learned in CJTP helped her?

She has always loved food and cooking, but says she learned people skills and reliability through CJTP–qualities that employers look for.

What's her dream?

One day she hopes to own 3 different restaurants, and then own a Bed & Breakfast in retirement.

25 Years of Feeding the Triangle

The following is a message from our Executive Director and Co-Founder, Jill Staton Bullard: 2014 marks our 25th year of feeding the Triangle, and I have been doing a lot of reflecting on how this movement started and how wonderful the journey thus far has been.

I had a reason this past month to rummage through 25 years of pictures as we prepared for our Taste of Hope celebration. We’ve come a long way since those early days of recovering food from grocery stores in the back of station wagons.   We truly stand on the shoulders of those early volunteers whose determination and hard work were the only fuel that powered what we did to feed hungry people.  Today, over 6000 volunteers help us recover or grow over 7 million pounds of food each year. It astounds me that we now serve 64,000 people per month throughout our region.

But, folks, the one thing I have learned is that this is simply not enough. Feeding people who are hungry right now is critical, but only by going after the root causes of hunger can we create a hunger-free and healthy community.  So this is the question that haunts me: As a community, how much longer are we going to tolerate 1 in 4 children not knowing where their next meal is coming from? —a fact that has NOT improved over the past 25 years!

Nurturing long term-solutions to poverty and lack of access to fresh healthy food is our mission. 

What can all of us do about it? Get educated. Get involved.  And a great place to start is with our new website.  One of the first things you’ll notice is that all of our programs are organized into “We feed. We  teach . We grow.”  This  illustrates the multiple approaches we are deploying in the community, from nutrition education to urban agriculture to  workforce development to creating economic opportunities.  Learn about hunger in our community on the Hunger Stats pages.  Learn how you can support good policy on our Advocacy page.  Learn about all the ways you can volunteer, and what your donated dollar can do.

Our theme for our 25th year is 25 YEARS OF INNOVATION.  BUILDING A HUNGER-FREE, HEALTHY COMMUNITY.

Are you willing to join our journey? To learn, to try new approaches?  To stand up to the status quo and challenge leadership to make policy that supports the empowerment  and self-sufficiency of poor people? Children’s lives depend on us. Can we really afford to wait another 25 years?

Hunger is unacceptable.  Only when we all determine to work together, can we END IT.

"Taste of Hope" raises $109,716

It was another sold out event, as Taste of Hope commemorated its 20th year by raising $109,716! This gathering of business leaders, chefs, and hunger-fighters proves that we can do BIG things when we all work together toward a common goal. Many heartfelt thanks to all of our sponsors for making the 20th Annual Taste of Hope Gala a powerful example of community working together to fight hunger! After expenses, $97,716 will go to fund IFFS programs to end hunger, including $20,000 to supply 57 children in need with BackPack Buddies for a year.

Maxine Solomon: 20 Fabulous Years of Leading Taste of Hope

At the event, Taste of Hope Committee Chair and Inter-Faith Food Shuttle Co-Founder Maxine Solomon was honored for her 20 years of Taste of Hope leadership. Thank you, Maxine!

Taste of Hope Committee Members:

Maxine Solomon Ann Marco Michelle Masella Corcoran Donna Hovis Kim Brame McGimsey Reneé Saddler Julie Stewart

Featured Chefs:

Scott James, Midtown Grille Daniel Schurr, Second Empire  Beth LittleJohn, Coquette  Scott Crawford & Daniel Benjamin, The Umstead Hotel Terri Hutter, IFFS Culinary Job Training Program

Thanks also to....

the Umstead Hotel & Spa for being our fabulous host

WRAL's Greg Fishel for being our Emcee (Maxine always  teases WRAL’s Greg Fishel about being the man in her bedroom every night for 20 years -- on TV, that is).

Brian Hoyle, aka "The Voice," for being our Auctioneer!

Logan Jacobs of Oak City Studios for donating the photography.

And to the sponsors who made it all possible-THANK YOU!

Oats: Not Just for Breakfast!

In honor of National Oats Month, the IFFS Nutrition team has pulled some of their favorite recipes with oats to share!  Oats are an affordable and versatile source of fiber and whole-grain!

• To start: The Ins and Outs of Making Oatmeal
• A different way of getting your oats in:  Blueberry Banana Oatmeal Smoothie 
• Jazz it up! A great alternative to your basic oatmeal:  Oatmeal with Mango and Cashews
• Oats can be used in savory dishes, too! For a more savory option, try Oatmeal-Crusted Chicken Tenders.
• To round it out with a sweet, still fiber-filled treat: a dessert: Thick, Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies!