Urban Blog
Jamie Oliver Foundation
What is the Jamie Oliver Foundation?
The Jamie Oliver Foundation is a registered charity with, in their own words, a simple aim: To empower, educate and inspire as many people as possible to love and enjoy good food through teaching, training and employment. They achieve this through a number of vehicles, arguably the most prominent of which is Fifteen, the restaurant group established in 2002. The name Fifteen comes from the original group of 15 unemployed, under-qualified young apprentices recruited to train alongside a team of25 professional chefs and mentors.
Over the next four years Fifteen Amsterdam and Fifteen Cornwall opened following the same model of using all the revenue from the restaurants to fund the programme and to date, over 220 young people have graduated across the restaurants with some of them now running their own restaurants, starring on TV or working in top class kitchens all over the world.
Please please please go check out the Jamie Oliver Foundation website
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Jamie's Ministry of Food
Ministry of food is all about getting people cooking again. Jamie's goal is to show us that anybody can learn to cook and that it can be fun, cost effective and, more importantly, far healthier than the convenient alternatives.
The ambition is fairly simple; to open food centres all over the country and beyond to hold cookery groups for parents, students, young adults, disabled people, charities and the general public.
It's a true testament to the concept when city councils, NHS foundations and the National Lottery got behind the idea and we were delighted to be asked to get involved!
Urban Myth supplied the London training kitchen where not only the food centre staff are trained but also where other community organisations and charities can go to use food as a way to both help and develop people in a less fortunate position to ourselves.
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Jamie's School Kitchen Garden Project
On a trip to Australia back in 2007, Jamie and Louise Holland (Jamie's manager) met Stephanie Alexander, founder of The Kitchen Garden Foundation. Stephanie's project, setting up both kitchens and gardens for the growing of fresh produce in schools across Australia for the purpose of educating and engaging children to grow, harvest, prepare and share fresh seasonal food, inspired them both.
In 2009, alongside other organisations, Urban Myth supplied the kitchen for the UK Kitchen Garden pilot project at the Orford Primary School, close to Louise's home. Safe to say, it was an unmitigated success and the hope is, with the correct backing, the project can be rolled out in other schools across the country, so much so that the foundation has recruited Michelle Smith as their school project manager.
In February 2012, Urban Myth will be supplying another kitchen to a school in Islington, London…watch this space!
update...
The kitchen at Rotherfield Primary School in Islington is now complete as is the Kitchen Garden Project site.
You can check it out and even get involved here
Have a look at what Jamie has to say about the Kitchen Garden Project here
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