Hello CulinaryCorps Friends and Supporters,
Last Thursday, we wrapped up our 2017 culanthropy trip to Houston, Texas. The week spent together was humbling. Inspiring. Tear-inducing. Laughter-filled. And nourishing on many levels. We could not have wished for a better group of chefs nor a more hospitable line-up of project partners. And we certainly could not have asked for kinder sponsors and supporters…aka YOU!
To give you quick sense of what we accomplished, we wanted to share our trip with minimal words and maximum impact. To that aim, we broke it all down into two categories:
PICTURES
Here’s a curated look at our week of projects via our CulinaryCorps Google photo stream. Click on the info tab in each photo to get a brief description of the project/photo. And leave a comment if you feel so inclined!
NUMBERS
Pictures say a thousand words but data says a whole lot more, 500 times that in fact! Here’s a look at the aggregate numbers from this year’s trip:
9 carefully selected chef-volunteers from across the country…
Including 1 Hawaiian, Aloha!
560 collective CulinaryCorps volunteer manpower hours across 5 days of culanthropy.
30 pounds of Plant It Forward Farms produce transformed into…
12 amazing potluck dishes created by our chef-volunteers.
20 recipes captured for Plant It Forward Farms to use in their CSA boxes.
$500 worth of Home Depot gift cards donated to the farmer families.
7,000 meals assembled at the Houston Food Bank for delivery to hungry children living in the city.
And 1,300 pounds of breaded chicken “trayed up” for the following day’s meal.
4 hands-on cooking classes launched for over 70 Camp PHEver campers from ages 3-21.
Over 140 PHE-free dishes created by the campers themselves using…
96-feet of spiralized cucumber
22 pounds of cauliflower rice for our protein-free Poke Bowls
70 cocktail umbrellas for our Rainbow Hawaiian Shave Ice (It was a Luau after all.)
Over 2 gallons of hand-spun vanilla ice cream made by…
30 “ice cream scientists” at the MD Anderson Children’s Cancer Center using just…
12 pillowcases. (Nope, that’s not a typo. It really works.)
And topped with 300,000 rainbow sprinkles!
$750 worth of kitchen equipment donated to the Houston Covenant House cooking program.
Thousands of heart-expanding moments of inspiration made possible by…
5 generous corporate sponsors,
1 super sweet Bake and Gather for Good fundraiser and
110 amazing individual donors, like you, who helped us meet our fundraising goal!
For all your kindness, we offer our unquantifiable thanks. And we promise to continue cooking it forward throughout the year.
With our deepest gratitude,
Chris Carroll, Executive Director
Christine Ranieri, 2017 Trip Coordinator
and the 2017 CulinaryCorps Chef-Volunteer Team