Culinary Training Kitchen
Welcome to the Culinary Training Kitchen!
Our culinary training kitchen is a home-economics-style classroom kitchen used for teaching guests the cooking skills they’ll need for self-sufficient living. It also helps guests learn skills for a range of culinary-related jobs and is key to our Hospitality Program
Culinary Arts Training Program
The final component of the Learning Center is a culinary training kitchen. There is a small kitchen in the Learning Center building that will be transformed into a residential home-economics-style classroom kitchen. This kitchen will be used to teach guests the cooking skills they’ll need for self-sufficient living. Many Mission guests have never learned to cook food from scratch.
Eugene Mission staff will also work with guests to learn skills in hospitality, including setting up the room, preparing a banquet or meal and delivering delicious food on time as part of a team effort. Many guests lack such skills and when organizations meet at the Mission, there is an opportunity to learn and connect.
The dedicated training kitchen also means that guests who are utilizing the therapeutic family space will have the opportunity to prepare snacks and meals with and for their children. This encourages valuable life skills supporting nutrition education and the bonding that occurs when meals are prepared together as a family.
Hospitality Program
This program welcomes civic groups to use our facilities for meetings. The groups are served beautiful and artfully plated meals prepared by guests working with a professional chef. Mission guests prepare a lovely meeting environment with china, linens, and flowers. Civic groups including Rotary, Lions, P.E.O., Kiwanis, and Emerald Valley Development Professionals have been quick to take note, especially during the pandemic.
They appreciate our flexibility and ability to provide for hybrid in-person/virtual meetings. A key Life Skills opportunity, R³ and Life Change participants learn hospitality and how civic leaders live their lives; Mission program participants feel empowered through the positive experience of relating to these groups, and the dignity and joy of serving as host. Our Hospitality Program is an effective public relations vehicle, helping 500 community members per month learn about homelessness, about the Eugene Mission. Visitors often become community ambassadors and advocates for our relational approach in the process.
