Live Love: based in Chandler, Arizona is a community development non-profit that partners with neighborhood leaders to build strong communities, connect people and care for neighbors. This grant will help fund a community garden and teaching kitchen in the downtown Chandler area.
The teaching kitchen is where community members - kids, teens, moms/dads, and grands learn to prepare, cook, eat, move, and think more healthfully - for a lifetime. Teaching kitchens are a learning / cooking lab that combines culinary hands-on live demonstrations, education, exercise, and mindful eating practices in hopes of creating healthier community members. The teaching kitchen does not advocate for a particular "diet", but rather teaches individuals-and by extension, their family members-to eat, cook, move, and think more healthfully.
Teaching kitchens offer education and basic cooking techniques in addition to other self-care topics like enhanced nutrition, mindfulness, physical activity, and behavioral health. Teaching kitchens make it fun and easy for students, young and old, to develop core educational concepts such as math, reading and team building skills via food preparation. For example, the teaching kitchen can be used to help students learn/understand the concepts of measurements, fractions, and percentages. Nutrition facts, making smart food choices, teamwork and sequencing are other skills and life lessons which are taught.
Teaching kitchens, wherever they have popped up are hugely successful, weather in a big city or in a small village.
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