In collaboration with Healthy Kids Community Challenge Rexdale, Rexdale Community Health Centre, and Toronto Public Health, Humber College students have launched the Let’s Eat Together program. The purpose of the program is to bring together children, their families, and community leaders to partake in four weeks of interactive culinary training, providing opportunities for skill development, sharing and learning from, about and with each other.
Since its inception on August 1st, 2017, the program has been delivered in partnership with 12 community agencies in the Rexdale community, imparting skills and opportunities for engagement to 200+ children, their families and community leaders. The program is administered and delivered by an interdisciplinary team of Humber students, who are trained and supported by Dieticians from Toronto Public Health and staff from the Rexdale Community Health Centre. Students are responsible for recruiting participants, working with community agencies to adapt the program for different populations, facilitating the workshops, and ensuring participants have fun while learning new skills and making new connections.
Megan Diercks, a 4th year student in the Bachelors of Creative Advertising program, acknowledged the experience enabled her to better understand the need of different groups.
“My experience in the Let’s Eat Together program has allowed me to better understand how food is understood and appreciated through different cultures, environments and age groups. The program has definitely helped my education in a way that working in an advertising office job never would have; it allowed me to meet and learn about new demographics that I wouldn’t have had access to in the advertisement world.”
While working with different groups in the community presented its challenges, Shah Bano, a student in the Bachelors of International Development program, described the value of building relationships in a team environment.
“As a team, we have to rely so much on each other to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Working with groups with different needs is challenging. By being flexible and attentive as a team, we build great relationships with different organizations, which helped me in understanding how to effectively build relationship with different communities and stakeholders.”
Project Team
Partners: Healthy Kids Community Challenge Rexdale, Rexdale Community Health Centre, Toronto Public Health
Project Lead: Matias Golob
Students: Megan Diercks, Shah Bano, Pegah Pourheidari, Mandisa Lau, Helena Emily Dedonatis, Liz Dalton, Helena Sebescen, Radhika Sharma, Matthew Borlaza, Sean Orchard