Troubled women find recipe for healing in culinary school
In a small commercial kitchen along a sketchy section of Colonial Drive, a recent day of classes begins with breathing exercises.
Then it moves to a discussion on healing the often-deep wounds of one’s inner child. Some of those wounds are still raw.
“I always thought I was a failure,” says one student who looks barely 20.
Ultimately, the class ends in a gourmet cupcake-decorating lesson — followed by gleeful tasting.
No, it is not your conventional culinary school. For these students — all women, all survivors of domestic violence, addiction, human trafficking or all of the above — it is more a school of life.
Some have been incarcerated; all are homeless, at least initially.
“Some of the women want to work in the culinary field; some don’t,” says John Hursh, who runs the program with his wife, Jane. “It’s not as much about learning to cook as it is about learning a new path.”
They call it the Toolbox4Life program — an eight-week course held each fall and spring for the past two years. The women, typically referred by the nonprofits that house them, attend for free, many of them spending up to two hours on a series of public buses to reach the classes.
“John and Jane are amazing,” says Carol Wick, CEO of the domestic-violence shelter Harbor House. “If somebody misses the bus, Jane will go pick a student up in her car. This is how they are. They are just very genuine. They feel like they can use their gifts and talents to help people, so they do it without reserve, without regard for the money.”
John and Jane: even their names invoke the mainstream middle-America life they came from. In their early ’50s, they live in a nice Winter Park neighborhood, have three kids, two of them in college. He was once an investment banker; she was a teacher. They have long Midwestern roots.
But one day walking to work on a wintry Chicago morning, John — in his expensive suit and tailored coat — caught himself stepping past homeless people huddled by subway grates, covering themselves with newspaper for warmth. The contrast stopped him.
“I thought, ‘Why am I here, and why are they there?’ ” he says. “It’s not like I had done something great to deserve it. ... I was kind of a jerk back then.”
It wasn’t an epiphany that led to overnight change, but eventually he left the corporate world for nonprofit work, and in 1995 after Jane left teaching, the two of them moved to Orlando to work for Cru — the interdenominational evangelical Christian organization then known as Campus Crusade for Christ. They eventually would wind up doing global humanitarian aid, lent out by Cru to a charity operating in Africa, Afghanistan and India — usually in places devastated by war and disaster.
Jane stayed behind with
the kids in France, near the charity’s headquarters. “During this time, the way I found to connect with other women was by baking with them,” she says.
After returning stateside in 2006, two ideas began to percolate: baking and changing lives. Eventually they decided to use one as a vehicle for the other.
Jane’s Short & Sweet is a small but rising business now selling Jane’s award-winning shortbread and a spa-quality sugar scrub. The 306 Foundation is a community-development nonprofit they formed in 2012. It is named after the Memphis motel-room number where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a role model, spent the final night of his life.
The former donates all profits to the foundation.
“Our vision is to be like Newman’s Own,” says Jane of the Paul Newman food enterprise that has funneled $450 million in profits to charity. “Of course, our profits are in the hundreds at this point.”
Still, with the launch of the Toolkit4Life program last year, Jane’s business has been able to employ a handful of students, something she hopes to expand.
Meanwhile, the foundation now has a budget of more than $250,000, most of it from private donors who give monthly, but there’s also a recent $10,000 grant from Orlando Health, which came with health screenings and nutrition education.
“To go there and teach those women — it is humbling,” says Jeff Lambert, co-owner of Blue Bird Bake Shop in Orlando’s Audubon Park, one of several popular eateries that have lent chefs to the program. “For them to have the courage to go there and be open and receptive after the cards they’ve been dealt ... well, I’m not sure I could do that.”
But in the borrowed commercial kitchen off West Colonial Drive, where John and Jane mix compassion and forgiveness with lessons on writing a résumé and making beef bourguignon, the unexpected is a frequent visitor.
“They listen. They’re there for you. They support you,” says Ceara Scheidt, 46, sober for three years. “I wasn’t used to that.”
Once homeless, she now has a small government-subsidized apartment and loves to cook. Maybe, she says, she can run her own food truck.
Classmate Tonya Redding, the oldest at 55, has been on her own since age 16. She supported her four children with restaurant jobs but battled alcohol abuse for decades. Last January, she was attacked on the streets by a stranger and nearly killed.
“I knew it was time for a change,” she says. “I surrendered to my higher power, and I found freedom. And then I found Mr. John and Ms. Jane. They want to help people who have been left behind.”
John and Jane don’t track what happens to their students after graduation, preferring to let the women keep in touch if they choose. They have heard that some land jobs in the food-service industry. Others simply drop off the radar.
“It’s their life,” John says. “Our goal is to plant some seeds, facilitate healing and help them move on to the next thing. Everything beyond that is kind of bonus.”