Food 4 Thought

Brought to you by: Pathways Kitchener

“…My mother has always cooked for me, and this brought interest in me because I need to cook next year when I move out, or I’m going to starve or lose money!”

A Pathways student
Man cooking infront of camera

Program Activity Snapshot:

  • We engaged youth in the creation of engaging food-related programming to benefit their community 
  • Youth created a series of instructional videos that were shared with their peers as part of mentoring programming and other youth across Kitchener through social media  
    • Youth chose the recipes and gathered the ingredients  
    • Youth scripted, filmed, edited, and prepared the videos for release 
  • Youth had multiple opportunities to contribute and provide their feedback on future video ideas through “dotmocracy” votes, social media polls, and direct feedback  

Objectives:

  1. Establish a process that includes multiple avenues for youth engagement, from active leadership to participation 
  2. Leverage technology to increase reach, build youth experience, and improve virtual presence 

What was the result?

  • Creation of an internal tool for staff to determine when to offer volunteer hours, honorariums, or paid staff positions for different engagement projects.  
    • Youth helped us define how we would measure participation for their honorariums (e.g., they decided what participation would look like to access 100% of the honorarium)  
  • Youth gained skills and experiences to help with school and career success, such as: 
    • Food preparation skills to work in the food industry 
    • Leadership and technology skills 
    • Youth interested in learning videography and editing were able to get experience and work with the software that we purchased 
  • Creation of a library of 8 Food Skills for Wellbeing videos to help with future programming  

Want to try this out?

What you’ll need:

  1. Staffing Support: One Program Facilitator working 8 hours per week for 12 weeks, and one youth host working 2 hours a week for 6 weeks  
  2. Duration: 7 months 
  3. Teaching Aids: 
    • Zoom 
    • Equipment for video production 
    • Equipment for food preparation  

What you’ll do:

  1. Recruit a core group of youth 
  2. Plan meetings for youth to get to know each other, brainstorm ideas, and plan videos  
  3. Create cooking videos with youth every other week (or use ours!)  
  4. Compile ongoing feedback and stories  

Downloadable resources (e.g. templates, examples used):

Kitchener-Report-Year-2-ENGDownload