Story and Photo by Amy Juschka
Dressed head to toe in kitchen whites and donning a toothy grin, Lazaro isn’t hindered by his broken English as he recounts his first few weeks at a unique culinary training program that helps people with barriers develop job and life skills.
Lazaro, who didn’t give his last name, is a Sicilian refugee claimant. After arriving in Vancouver, he was sent by Immigrant Services to the H.A.V.E Culinary Training Society—which runs its training program out of a small café on Powell Street. The eight-week program will provide Lazaro with all the culinary training and certification he needs to get an entry-level cooking position, while allowing him to brush up on his language skills.
In a thick Sicilian accent, he talks about his fondness for baking cookies and banana bread before he’s interrupted by Amber Anderson, the program’s head-instructor and executive director, who tells him it’s time to get back to work. “It’s hard to keep him [in the kitchen],” laughs Anderson. “He’s always wandering out and chatting everyone up. He’s one of our ones that keeps me running; I’m always on him, ‘Come on, get back to work,’ because he’s very social, it’s great.”
Nathan Veerathan is another student in the program. Originally from Sri Lanka, Veerathan was introduced to H.A.V.E, which stands for Hope Action Values Ethics, through an employment resource centre in East Vancouver, and is excited to complete his training. Today he’s working in the dish pit, but he doesn’t mind—he likes doing dishes and chopping vegetables, and hopes he can find a job doing prep work when he’s completed his training.
Lazaro and Veerathan are just two of 25 students currently under the tutelage of Anderson and fellow-chef, Sabrina Bouzid. The students all share various barriers to employment—several have lived with drug or alcohol addiction, some with mental health issues, while others struggle with English as a second language.
“Most of the people that come in here have single barriers, but we have a lot with more than one,” explains Anderson. “If you can think of a barrier, we’ve probably had someone in here.”
Anderson and Bouzid work one-on-one with students, teaching them basic cooking techniques and food safety practices in the back of the café. After seven weeks of training, students then complete a one-week practicum at a restaurant. As part of the program, students receive food safe certification, bus tickets, breakfast, lunch, uniforms, tools and a $100 honorarium upon successful completion of the course.
Anderson says eight weeks is long enough to master the cooking skills, though the confidence doesn’t always come as easily. “A lot of times I’ll send people out for a job and their confidence is still too low, so I bring them back and we work with them until we can get their confidence levels up,” she explains. “So even though we say it’s an eight-week program, sometimes I need to keep them under my wing a bit longer.
Of the 151 students to have gone through the training program, 96 are working at restaurants like White Spot, The Old Spaghetti Factory and The Fish House in Stanley Park, while Anderson says the other 55 have either fallen through the cracks or fallen off the wagon.
Karen Barnaby, executive chef at The Fish House says she currently employs two H.A.V.E graduates, Kevin and Mike, and is very satisfied with their performance. “What I’m so impressed with is their dedication,” said Barnaby over the phone. “Training is easy, but the right attitude is always harder to come by.”
In fact, the non-profit’s success rate is starting to catch the eye of some powerful backers. Anderson says she was recently contacted by the provincial government about the possibility of cloning H.A.V.E’s program elsewhere in the province. “For the first few years nobody wanted to help us with funding, but now we’re really successful and everyone’s going, ‘Oh, maybe there is something here’.”
H.A.V.E. currently receives support from the B.C. Restaurant and Food Association, the B.C. and Yukon Hotels' Association and donations from individuals. H.A.V.E also operates the café, where the grilled chicken salad with strawberries and candied walnuts and the war wonton soup with barbequed pork and shrimp wontons are all made by the students.
Lazaro manages to escape from the kitchen and a watchful Anderson to bring me a cup of hot, sweet coffee. He says he has hope for the future. “When you’re done here you can do something. You never in your life do nothing, but here you practice and they give you chance. I think it’s beautiful they give the chance for me to find a new life.”
The H.A.V.E Café is located at 374 Powell St. It serves breakfast and lunch from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Friday.
