As a student and an entrepreneur, I was excited to learn about the Center for Social Innovation at Tulane, and even more excited to hear about the amazing opportunities that SISE offers to support innovation and entrepreneurship on and off-campus. I am PhD student in Public Health, and also the co-founder of The Cookbook Project, a non-profit organization that empowers youth to be the catalysts for healthier, more sustainable communities through food literacy and cooking education. To make the biggest impact, we train Food Literacy Educators to work with youth in their communities.

Thanks to an award from the Victor C. Alvarez Spark Fund, I was able to test the efficacy of an onsite training component, to improve the overall success of the online Food Literacy Educator training program. As a Public Health student, I was able to integrate the knowledge and methods that I have been learning in my classes about program planning and monitoring and evaluation into this very real world application.

The award covered all of the costs related to hosting this onsite training, and also allowed the staff of The Cookbook Project to pursue Serve Safe certification. We discovered through surveys and program implementation data that leaders who completed the onsite training component not only felt more prepared to lead a program, but were more successful in launching their programs. Check out these great photos from the onsite training which was hosted at the Keller Library’s community teaching kitchen:

An unexpected result of the training program was that our organization was able to identify two key potential partner organizations for expanding the reach of the program in New Orleans. A few of the many adorable and inspiring photos are posted here:

To find out more about how you can get involved check The Cookbook Project’s website, and definitely have a look at this great article that was recently featured in the Louisiana Public Health Institute Newsletter.