Chef moves from restaurants to nonprofit that fights hunger

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Much of Kathy Jones' career as a chef looks the way you might expect. She started with washing dishes, tried culinary school, spent months traveling around and learning from different chefs, opened restaurants of her own and won a few awards along the way.

But when the Indiana native who grew up in Florida decided to volunteer her skills at a food-based Indianapolis nonprofit, she realized she could be doing something more.

Second Helpings, which has served the Indianapolis area since 1998, turns donations of perishable and surplus foods into meals for groups that serve hungry residents at meal programs throughout Indianapolis. Just as importantly, the organization also gives adults in need of a second chance the skills to start a career in the culinary field.

"Transforming lives through the power of food - there's really nothing else like what we do in the country. No place that does food rescue, hunger relief and culinary job training," Jones said.

Jones began volunteering at Second Helpings in 2002, just a few years after moving back to Indiana from Florida. At the time, she was busy running her own restaurant, but she helped when she could, calling it her favorite organization.

Her experience made her invaluable at Second Helpings to both the students in the job-training program and to the staff working to use whatever food they had to prepare meals for the many organizations they served.

She left Indiana again a few years later, for Alaska, where she worked at a hotel restaurant. But she was ready for a change in 2017, when the executive chef job at Second Helpings opened up.

As executive chef at Second Helpings, Jones is in charge of overseeing both the culinary job training and hunger relief programs.

Jennifer Vigran, CEO of Second Helpings, says that Jones often talks of her other chef friends. "They'll ask if she's afraid she'll lose her creativity. She just laughs."

With a different staff of volunteers from other Indy-area organizations and a different menu each day, she never knows what to expect. "You know some days it doesn't even feel like work because I enjoy it so much," Jones said.

The brisk pace of restaurant kitchen work has intrigued Jones since she was a little girl. She got her first taste of that life as a high schooler in the 1980s, busing tables at a family friend's restaurant along Florida's Gulf Coast, near Fort Myers.

Over the first several months, she took every opportunity to sneak over to the prep area to see how the food was being made. "When we were slow, I'd go over and learn," Jones said.

She continued to work her way up, eventually to line cook, and later spent time at a culinary school.

Jones then worked in kitchens across the country before moving back to Indianapolis in the late 1990s to open her first restaurant, which was Downtown. She moved to Florida when she was 8 but had followed much of her family back to Indiana. In the coming years, she'd open another restaurant and work in various others across the city before taking the job with Second Helpings.

While Jones paved her own way into the culinary field, for more than 20 years Second Helpings has been helping adults find a new lease on life by preparing for careers in the culinary field.

In the classroom near the nonprofit's working kitchen, where students gather to learn everything from safety to salads to proper knife cuts, a sign hangs that reads "Heal the world. Cook dinner tonight."

More than 800 students since 1998 have gathered in that room to learn and train in preparation for graduation. Vigran says it's more than a culinary program for graduates. "They are building self-sufficiency for themselves and their families."

The program is a commitment. For seven weeks, students gather at Second Helpings from Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. "In completing the program they've developed a solid record. They can say to employers 'I showed up every day for seven weeks,'" Vigran said.

During the 20 years Second Helpings has had a job-training program its length and course content have changed many times. Currently, students graduate with certifications in food safety and CPR - and with five credits from Ivy Tech. All graduates will have completed financial literacy, resume and job-interview training and will have access to in-house job placement assistance.

Jones always spends the program's first day with the new students and is in and out of the room during their training, offering advice and lending a hand. But the program's two instructors are mainly in charge of the day-to-day.

Kyle Burnett, one of the instructors, just started at Second Helpings in December. "I'm definitely familiar with the fight these students are going through." Burnett started working in a restaurant at age 15 and has worked a number of food-related jobs since. "You watch them go from 'I don't know if I can do this. This is my last chance at life' to being filled with hope and a sense of purpose."

"Obviously the goal is to get them a job, to get them hired. We teach our students that they need a job with security," Jones said. The average age of the people in the program is 36.

Last year, 87 percent of its students had a job following graduation in which they were making an average of $12 an hour.

"We can get you in the door where you don't have to beg to be let in," Vigran said.

Jeffery Hartfield, one of the program's 837 total graduates, has worked at Flatwater in Broad Ripple since the day after he graduated five years ago. He started with washing dishes like Jones did, but he currently works as a line cook.

Hartfield, who had always loved watching the Cooking Channel, needed more than just a job five years ago, and that's what the culinary job training program prepared him for.

"I think the job training program was priceless. It changed my life," Hartfield said.

Changing lives is what drew Jones - and a number of others - to Second Helpings. It's the difference between a job and a mission.

"Not everyone is really happy about being at work. I come here every day, and everyone is happy to be here."

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Source: The Indianapolis Star

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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com