LOCAL SCHOOL ACCEPTED INTO PRESTIGIOUS TEACHING KITCHEN

Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy: First PK – 12 School in U.S. Accepted into Teaching Kitchen Collaborative

By Jennifer Murphy – CHCA 

CINCINNATI, OH (February 16, 2022) – Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy’s (CHCA’s) Teaching Kitchen was formally accepted into the prestigious Teaching Kitchen Collaborative (TKC), an invitational network of educational, research, and community organizations with teaching kitchens to be used to enhance personal and public health (www.teachingkitchens.org).  CHCA is the first and only K-12 institution in the Collaborative (joining organizations like Google and Compass Group along with several universities, hospitals, and health systems).

The CHCA Teaching Kitchen serves a dual purpose: emphasizing culinary skills and nutritional wellbeing for a healthy life and also providing an opportunity for students to run the kitchen as a revenue-generating business, producing products marketed and sold through CHCA’s Eagle Farms Marketplace. Students in Grades 9-12 interact with the Teaching Kitchen formally through elective courses or as a business internship, while PK-Grade 8 students have more informal Teaching Kitchen experiences. With a unique approach to health and wellness, The Teaching Kitchen, housed in CHCA’s 4,000 sq. ft. greenhouse, leverages techniques and methodologies which reflect an understanding of the importance of local food grown without harm, most of which is grown right on CHCA’s campuses.  Students in all grades witness farm-to-school techniques firsthand when they harvest produce from the school gardens and incorporate it into healthy meals. 

“The TKC affiliation lends significant weight to CHCA’s overall program and places us directly in a network of top tier universities and institutions,” –  Stephen Carter, CHCA’s Director of Entrepreneurship and Sustainability who oversees CHCA’s Teaching Kitchen.

The TKC is a unique collaborative of medical professionals, chefs, educators, researchers, and food system experts dedicated to the improvement of personal and public health. It was formally launched in 2016 as an invitational network of thought leading organizations using teaching kitchen facilities as catalysts of enhanced personal and public health across medical, corporate, school, and community settings. Dr. David Eisenberg formed the TKC to connect individual innovators using teaching kitchens as catalysts for health enhancement, in partnership with The Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The TKC is now a global network of 44 teaching kitchens, with members that span an organizational range from leading academic medical centers to public youth services institutions to private employers. The TKC functions as an accelerator to support the reproducibility, scalability, and evaluation of emerging teaching kitchen models and educational programs. ǂ Acceptance into this collaborative has become highly competitive over the years and only a handful of applications are accepted annually.

David Eisenberg, Executive Director of the TKC, welcomes CHCA to its membership with great enthusiasm.  “The vision for this unique program and facility, instigated by Stephen Carter and boldly supported by the CHCA’s leadership, is one that will unquestionably be watched, and learned from, by K-12 schools across the nation.  One of the audiences of greatest interest to the TKC is K-12 students, as their ability to learn to eat, cook, move, and think more healthfully will likely inform their personal and professional paths for a lifetime. We thank the CHCA community for launching this exciting prototype.”

For more information about CHCA and their Teaching Kitchen, visit www.chca-oh.org

To learn more about the TKC and for a full list of TKC members, visit www.teachingkitchens.org