Converse and Cook is about creating social spaces where individuals are empowered to explore their connection to food and their community by creating meals and dining together.
Information for Community Leagues
Information for Community Leagues
Thanks for your interest in Converse and Cook. We’re excited to work with you to bring engaging content to your membership and beyond. Like many of you, we’re 100% volunteer-run, so we know the importance of partnering to increase capacity.
We’ve detailed ways we can work with you below. Please note that this is to give you ideas. We’re certainly open to exploring other options. We want to ensure that whatever we do, we are fulfilling our mandate of creating social spaces using food while also meeting whatever needs your Community Leagues have.
[/bg_collapse]
Who’s on Our Team?
Our volunteers have diverse skill sets and identities. We’ve listed some of them below so you get a sense of the breadth and diversity of programming opportunities we can offer:
Community Members: including writers, youth, folks with extensive experience in the nonprofit sector, Community League Board Members and League Members, volunteers who identify with underrepresented groups, and international students.
Healthcare students are providers including: Registered Dietitian, graduate students in cardiac care research, occupational therapy, public health practitioners, teachers
Skills sets within our team (note not everyone has all these skills, pending the needs of the League we can choose volunteers to show up): Supporting Listening and Conversation, Facilitation, QPR and suicidal risk training, restorative conversations training, diversity and inclusion knowledge, food literacy and knife skills training, food photography and food styling training, general love and passion for co-creating meals together
Other opportunities we can offer to Community Leagues
Generally, we bring the content, groceries, appliances/equipment, and volunteers. We’ll handle registration, set-up, take-down and all the cleaning in the middle. Our programming is created to foster community building among participants. If your League has a new board or is looking for new ways to animate your spaces or reach out to underrepresented pockets in your community, our programming may be an option for you. There are two streams of our programming that we’ve highlighted below. Each stream also includes additional asks of what we would need of the Community League to run out programs out of your amenities.
We ask for at least 6 weeks’ notice prior to the date of when you’re hoping for a workshop or social. Our mandate is to make programs as accessible as possible. We usually offer workshops and socials by donation and always hold free seats for those for whom cost is a barrier. For Leagues, we can do workshops for their members for free and charge non-League Members a fee to attend (which might provide some incentive to join your League!).
Virtual Programming (currently accepting bookings for January 2023 and beyond)– we can do a host of fun workshops and activities centred around food for your members. Examples include a pizza-making workshop and a Food Styling and Food Photography Workshop.
What we need from Leagues: Promotion of the event.
In-Person Programming (booking for January 2023 and beyond)
Cooking Socials: A relationship-building take on cooking classes. These 2-3 hour socials are run for groups of 16-20 participants. During this time we break participants into small groups to prepare and cook a meal together. At the end of the night, we all eat together.
Throughout the social, we facilitate conversation and ensure everyone is learning and having fun.
We’ll bring the groceries, utensils/ appliances, volunteers, paperwork, and anything else needed to run the social. We’ll also handle registration.
Pending on your Community League’s needs, we can also bring in partner organizations like Fresh Routes or WeCan to talk about the services they can offer to your League Members.
We’re open to running versions of our socials. For example, if your League has a community garden and has a League Member who wants to put on a canning workshop, we can work with your League Member to make that a reality. If you have League Members interested in facilitating a social, we’d be happy to support them.
We use team cooking which is different from traditional classes where there are one lead instructor and pairs of people all cooking the same dish. At our socials, participants are broken into teams of 4-5 where each team cooks a part of the dinner (entree, main, dessert) for the rest of the group to eat.
One facilitator is responsible for putting together the menu (often with Community input) and several support volunteers who help the teams follow instructions. Often, the menu is tailored to reflect the facilitator’s culture or interests that they want to share with the broader community. The Converse and Cook volunteers work with the facilitator to support their leadership skills to facilitate the class.
Everyone has varying skill levels, and all skill levels are welcomed. The class’s non-hierarchical structure allows for people to learn together/from each other by swapping “tips and tricks” from their own kitchen hacks.
Our target population for these socials includes everyone from post-secondary students, community members, people with disabilities, English language learners etc.
We have volunteers trained in different skills like supportive listening, dietetics, newcomer health, etc. who can help support the participants’ specific needs.
What we would need from Community Leagues to run this program:
Hall space (we can work in spaces with and without a kitchen! In fact, we’ve hosted several socials in classrooms). As we are a small non-profit with under $3000 annual operating budget, we cannot afford rent.
Access to a bathroom with warm water a soap
Access to a sink of some kind
* We can also move our socials outdoors in the summer months
Promotion of the cooking social to your League and Community Members
*We’re more than happy for League Board members to join in as well. And we’d welcome you selling memberships at the social (we just ask that your membership director also come and cook with us- trust us you’ll have higher sales this way)!
Insurance: Currently all participants and volunteers sign liability forms. We do not have any formal insurance as our programs are deemed low risk and we have historically been covered by the insurance in the spaces we facilitate socials. If your League is concerned about this we are happy to talk to your insurance provider. to get more details.
If our programs sound like a good fit for your League, please get in touch. You can email us at converseandcook@gmail.com or use the form below. We’ll aim to get back to you within 5 business days. Thanks for your interest. We can’t wait to meet you and work with you to build community in your neighbourhoods.
