Thanks to the generous support of our community, we are excited to be introducing a new project this year for our young people at A Taste of Paradise Farm. We are building an outdoor kitchen and the young people are watching with eagerness and anticipation.
This idea was suggested by our mentors as another way of increasing the life skills of the young people who are in our programs. It will give us the opportunity to integrate our garden produce with teaching nutrition and cooking skills. There will also be the potential to include building skills in our programs as much of the kitchen will be completed by our staff, young people, and volunteers.
We are very grateful to several donors who have made this possible. Stocklands initially donated the funds for a bar-b-que and then the Nutrien Ag Solutions Community Grants Program administered through the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal, and in addition the Kidzfix organization, came on board with donations to enable us to build an outdoor kitchen area to house the bar-b-que, as well as benches, cupboards and ultimately a pizza oven. All these organisations value our mentoring program’s input into the mental wellbeing of at-risk and disadvantaged young people.
We have already prepared the site for the kitchen, next to the training room which will eventually have a door leading straight into the kitchen area. We would also like to thank our friends, Bill and Judy, for the loan of their excavator, and Boral concrete for also supporting us.
We can envision many other ways we can use this outdoor kitchen space including staff development days, volunteer thank you lunches, donor thank you bar-b-ques and other special functions.
Thank you to everyone involved for the vision and support for this project.
