Every two weeks, 25 or so people gather in Vetri Community Partnership’s Teaching Kitchen to learn how to cook. People start trickling in at 5 pm, arriving from work, school, or home, and by 5:30, the kitchen is full. Everyone then dons an apron and starts cooking a nutritious recipe led by a trained educator.
These classes, referred to as Community Cooking Classes, take place the second and fourth Tuesday of each month at
Vetri Community Partnership, located at 915 Spring Garden Street. The Teaching Kitchen opened officially in 2022, and has welcomed over 1,000 people through its doors in that time for free cooking classes. That’s right–the classes are totally free for participants.
Feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive. “I feel so blessed every time I get to come here. It’s just so wonderful that you do this,” one neighbor told us during a class. Kids of all ages also join in the cooking classes with their parent or guardians and keep everyone laughing, like one youth participant who said about their cutting prowess, “Yo, my knife skills are about to be elite!”
Ultimately, Vetri Community Partnership’s goal with these classes is to nourish minds and bodies by increasing exposure to nutritious foods and developing practical life skills that teach people of all ages how to prepare nutritious foods in a delicious way. Giana, another youth participant, told an educator, “I catch myself doing things at home that I learned here. My mom is always like ‘how did you learn to hold a knife like that?'”
If you’d like to join one of these classes, check out our Classes and Events page and register for one. These classes are totally free of cost to participants thanks to the generosity of ACME Markets Foundation, Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, Clarence Rowell Charitable Trust, and a whole host of generous donors.
