At Loyola University Maryland, Maeve Sutula (she/her) studied Communication. In the classroom, she felt like every course encouraged “takeaways” but that often, those were focused on her – her learning, her growth, her career. She wanted to apply her education in new ways. “I serve because I want to use the skills I learned in college to benefit my community. I serve because this experience will allow me to reconfigure my education to benefit others rather than myself.” Maeve’s capacity building project gave her the chance to do just that.
At Second Harvest in Spokane, Maeve is making use of her communication skills in the Kitchen. Designed to both teach cooking and turn strangers into friends, The Kitchen keeps Maeve busy setting up, teaching and cleaning up from cooking classes. The space is amazing, but it is not unlimited. Each class has a capacity of 20 people. And because of the nature of this program, most of the folks who come to the Kitchen’s classes come from the city of Spokane, even though Second Harvest serves a much broader expanse of the region. In this tension, Maeve saw a need she could address with her project. She could create the resources needed to help people learn to cook in their own kitchens, even in the farther parts of their region.
On days The Kitchen is closed, Maeve started to record cooking videos. With all the work involved in making classes possible, she found that “it was hard to find time to use the space to record videos.” But, as she learned to balance her time and use her days without classes well, her project came together.
“I hope that after I leave Second Harvest, the cookbook and accompanying videos are shared with agencies and other community members. The Kitchen is a very valuable resource that should be available to as many people as possible. The classes themselves are limited to 20 people, most of whom live within the city itself. Second Harvest’s service area expands far beyond the city, with agencies located all over Washington and Northern Idaho. Hopefully, this resource will allow people in all of those areas to benefit from the great work done in the Kitchen!”
Learn more about The Kitchen here.
Check out Maeve’s videos:
Crunchy Rainbow Wrap
