CulinaryCorps (TM) designs, organizes and launches outreach experiences for culinary students and professionals. Currently, our efforts are centered on the rebuilding efforts and culinary renaissance of New Orleans, LA.

Combining food-centered volunteer projects with culinary educational activities, CulinaryCorps provides team members with an opportunity to transform their kitchen skills and passion for food into community outreach tools.

CulinaryCorps partners with food-related organizations and businesses embedded within a community, lending manpower to their goals and objectives while working within the framework of the community’s own culinary heritage. Each itinerary combines a broad range of service project partners, from farmers markets to school gardens, crisis kitchens to professional restaurants, intended to expose Corps members to the varied, vital and oftentimes complex role food plays in the wellbeing of a community. For a sample schedule, please view our June 2007 Itinerary.

At its core, each CulinaryCorps experience is launched to provide necessary support and solidarity to the community served. But beyond the service objectives, it is hoped that each CulinaryCorps volunteer departs with a unique connection to the community and a profound realization of their leadership potential outside of the kitchen.

Ultimately, CulinaryCorps aims to build a force of our nation’s most promising culinary leaders who are committed to setting the standard of social activism within the culinary field.

CulinaryCorps is based in Manhattan and is a non-profit pursuit under the fiscal sponsorship of Share Our Strength, a 501(c)3 organization fighting global hunger and based in Washington, DC.

Founding Director

Christine Carroll grew up eating the cuisine of her Brooklyn roots (lupini beans, pine-nut studded meatballs) while falling in love with the foodways native to each state she passed throughout her childhood (sugar on snow in VT, spoonbread in VA). She graduated cum laude in 2000 with a degree in biological psychology from The College of William and Mary, taking a hiatus during her junior year to serve as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Anchorage, Alaska. Post-graduation, she held a research position at Harvard University’s Burden of Disease Unit, then moved on to work as an analyst at a major pharmaceutical company.

Relocating to Cambridge, England in 2003, Christine took a once-a-week French cooking class at a local community college to pursue her kitchen fascination while job hunting. Fortunately, her culinary instructor nabbed her before big pharma could and she has been a professional cook ever since. Christine completed her Grand Diploma in Culinary Arts at the French Culinary Institute in January of 2007.

As one of twenty 2006 Henckels Cutting Edge scholarship winners attending October’s Share Our Strength conference in New Orleans, Christine experienced one of America’s few indigenous cuisines and worked alongside those fighting to preserve it during this time of post-Katrina rebuilding. She also had the pleasure of experiencing the city with an amazing group of culinary students who understood that, when combined, food and community service can make a profound impact.

Upon her return to New York City, she immediately began to brainstorm about returning to NOLA with culinary students and professionals in tow to both volunteer their kitchen skills and consume large quantities of beignets, po’ boys and pralines. After some preliminary research, it became clear that although organized volunteer opportunities in NOLA were plentiful, few specifically courted the expertise of culinary professionals. CulinaryCorps was created from that void.

Christine now spends her time working towards developing CulinaryCorps into a world-class service organization for culinary professionals. She is also a freelance chef in New York city.