Jacobsen Valentine gets his day started by cooking — not for himself, but for hundreds of strangers.
Valentine, 32, is the founder and executive director of Feed the Mass, a nonprofit cooking education organization that was started in 2016 to help aspiring cooks and food lovers learn about healthy eating, cooking and food scarcity. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he’s busy leading teams of volunteers in cutting up vegetables, boiling pasta and manning the grill to make meals for anyone who needs food.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions to file for unemployment around the country starting in March, Valentine launched the Fed Project under Feed the Mass to provide free meals to anyone in the Portland metro who needs them. Valentine and his crew have served well over 10,000 meals since the pandemic started.
Cooking has always been a part of Valentine’s life. He moved to Oregon with his mother and grandmother from Hawaii when he was 11 after his mom struggled to find decent work there. They were the kind of family to cook every meal and have barbecues on the weekends. It wasn’t anything special to Valentine, just part of his daily life.
He always knew it wasn’t out of the question to become a chef one day; he liked the idea of becoming some celebrity chef like Gordon Ramsay or Bobby Flay, even though that was every chef’s dream. His grandmother went to culinary school and became a chef at the age of 45.
As Valentine grew up, he became more involved in sports and was a star track athlete in high school. He received a track scholarship at Mt. Hood Community College, but said he wasn’t focused enough to keep it. That’s when his best friend at the time told him he should take cooking classes because he cooks all the time anyway; it was something he seemed passionate about.
He soon began taking classes at the Western Culinary Institute in Portland before it became the now-defunct Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. Though he finished school and got a culinary degree, he felt a lot of what he was learning was stuff that could easily be learned by watching cooking shows on TV or by practicing on his own.
He wasn’t sure the culinary school experience was all that worth it after leaving with around $40,000 in debt and a life lived at the poverty level. He quickly learned that many restaurants don’t even recognize culinary degrees.
Valentine then threw himself directly into the workforce, bouncing from one restaurant to the other. He worked as a semi-truck mechanic for a year, which gave him carpal tunnel and led to surgery on both his hands at the same time.
After shuffling through restaurants and working at three or four at a time, Valentine landed a couple jobs at retirement homes and hospice care centers. This is where he learned about dietary restrictions and medical needs, which gave him a better understanding of food education and healthy eating.
With broader experience behind him, Valentine landed a job as a cook at Serratto, a Mediterranean restaurant and bar. He didn’t feel secure in his position as a cook until he was offered a job at Oswego Lake Country Club, where he was able to work 40 hours a week and not have to pick up jobs on the side.
Valentine started volunteering at Holy Family Parish as a youth pastor in his free time while working at the country club. He took a group of kids on a mission trip to San Francisco in 2015 to talk to them about food scarcity within the community of people experiencing homelessness. The kids he worked with weren’t very into healthy eating, so he showed them how to cut a watermelon with a credit card in hopes the cool trick will get them more interested in healthy foods.
“Everybody started cutting all the fruit with credit cards while we were out and about,” he said.
After the trip Valentine wanted to continue a healthy eating program through the church, but it didn’t get much support at the time. That’s when Feed the Mass was born.
Volunteers help get food prepared to make free meals on July 31 at Redd East. The group works with Feed the Mass, a nonprofit cooking education organization that was founded by Jacobsen Valentine.
Feed the Mass started out as a chance for Valentine to teach kids how to cook and have healthy eating habits. The program slowly grew to include classes for adults. Classes bounced around stores and venues such as Know Thy Food Cooperative and Fred Meyer, depending on space availability.
Feed the Mass started attracting volunteers and interns around 2017 who wanted to help and get experience teaching others how to cook. Some of those interns came from the Art Institute of Portland, which opened an opportunity for Valentine to use the school’s culinary classrooms five days a week during its off-season up until it closed in 2018 after the school filed for bankruptcy.
Valentine was back to teaching wherever there was space available. He spent more than a year teaching classes at the downtown Whole Foods location, and did a stint at Faubion School in Northeast Portland. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The pandemic shuttered practically all business around the country and forced schools to close down early. Without a space to cook, Valentine was entirely out of work. He didn’t know what was next and he hadn’t been approved for unemployment. Then there was a class-action lawsuit against Career Education Corp., which includes Le Cordon Bleu, for deceiving students about their job prospects if they attended school there. The lawsuit resulted in Valentine and many other students receiving $11,000 from the school.
Soon after he received the money in March, Valentine was also approved for unemployment, going from having no money to survive to having a sense of security for the time being. He had a decision to make — whether to use that money toward investments, house and loan payments or something for himself. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis on May 25.
As a social uprising was unfurling on top of a global pandemic, Valentine knew he wanted to use his money to help others. In the beginning he and his crew gave more than 100 meals directly to protesters downtown and partnered with organizations such as Snack Bloc PDX. As a Black-Hawaiian man, Valentine knew he didn’t want to work directly on the streets helping feed people and teaching people to cook. He saw it as too big a risk of losing the resources he’s created for people.
Valentine was back to working out of wherever was available, from restaurants before their official open hours to venues around the city. He saw working out of restaurants as a chance to advertise for that business in hopes of bringing more customers there to keep it afloat during the pandemic. For a while he worked with a team of volunteers out of Redd West, a former distribution hub and sales center that was upgraded with three production kitchens.
He now has a contract with Ecotrust to work out of Redd East, a similar event space to Redd West. He works with a crew of volunteers to create meals from donated food, making about 1,800 meals a week for people to have for free.
Anyone who needs a meal can pick-up up to three meals a day from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week at the Southeast Ninth Avenue entrance of Redd East.
Valentine said businesses and community members around Portland had donated more than $100,000 for kitchen equipment to make Feed the Mass’ initiative a reality. Food donations come from several places, including Pok Pok, Airbnb and churches, which would have thrown out the food the next day if it didn’t get used.
Volunteers with Feed the Mass bring in food donations from Pok Pok, a local Thai restaurant chain, on July 31. Jacobsen Valentine, founder and executive director of Feed the Mass, started a program called the Fed Project, which helps feed thousands for free.
“It keeps growing and I keep meeting more and more people who want to help,” he said.
He said the pandemic had allowed people who couldn’t normally volunteer to do so. The program now has around 300 volunteers and almost 30 chefs. He’s glad that even though things are down, people are doing something positive with their time and giving back to their community.
There are many initiatives Valentine is trying to start within the next couple months. He’s hoping to hire a team of about a dozen people to work with him full-time, open up more kitchens around the city and permanently move into a building at Southwest Morrison Street and Third Avenue. His goal is to make close to 4,000 free meals a week, if not more.
“And that’s just one business,” he said.
The downtown space will be called Empowerment Central PDX. It will be a space for Valentine to continue with his photography business and to open a space for Black and Indigenous people of color to work comfortably. He sees it as a place for people of color to build each other up and work together to get small businesses off the ground.
“We gotta help each other,” Valentine said.
Valentine started a Black and Indigenous peoples’ creative fund to help support opening up a space in the Morrison Street building for Black and Indigenous people to have a space to get their businesses started up in a safe work environment. Every person who works there would have a code to access the workspace, as well as codes for restrooms and other shared spaces.
Valentine’s girlfriend, Daynelle Bibb, will also be moving her yoga studio Om Thrive into a space in the building, as well as her skincare business Helen Rose. Om Thrive is a yoga studio for survivors of domestic abuse.
“We’re working together to create a safe space for people to get well and for them to be able to work and not feel like they’re in any danger,” Valentine said.
Tours of the building and workshare spaces will be available starting Aug. 16.
Valentine is of the mindset that right now people need to learn how to give, so he doesn’t want to charge people anything for food or spaces to work.
“There are certain points where people need to pay and there are certain times where we need to give,” he said.
Feed the Mass, a nonprofit cooking education organization in Portland, uses fresh foods donated from local organizations and businesses to make free meals for people. The group makes about 1,800 meals a week and anyone is able to pick up a meal Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week.
A large part of Valentine’s initiative with Feed the Mass is that food is available for everyone. His team does food rescue and makes meals out of food that will be thrown out if it isn’t used within the next day or two. He sees it as there isn’t just enough food to feed those experiencing homelessness, but that there’s enough rescued food to feed everyone.
“This is a systemic problem that I can try to fix,” he said. “Take all the food that’s going to get thrown away or thrown in landfills and give it away.”
Valentine has tried to use some days to feed healthcare workers and protesters as well. He feels like food is one of the little things that brings comfort to all people.
“People keep saying that Portland is very unaffectionate,” he said. “I want to change that narrative and have people feel that there is love in this city.”
One of Valentine’s favorite quotes goes along the lines of “If you’re limited to getting paid for doing good things, then no matter what you do it’ll never be a good thing.” He feels like it’s a quote he lives by, and that if he helps enough people, maybe he’ll get help in return one day.
“We have to set the example of true giving, not giving in order to get something,” he said.
Valentine said his way of protesting alongside people in the Black Lives Matter movement was by providing resources such as food. He can’t be out protesting with groups every day because he doesn’t want to risk something happening to him, which would jeopardize the programs he’s started.
Valentine sees the programs he’s started as a form of protest in themselves because he’s trying to create generational systemic change in healthy food access for people of color, food education and healthcare for people of color, which is all in turn giving back to the community he works in.
“The only way the black community gets out of this together and stronger is if we stick together and literally grow each other,” he said. “We have a small window of time to make a real positive impact. This is the time.”
-- Ty Vinson
503-221-4315; @ty_vinson_
Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
"feed" - Google News
August 05, 2020 at 04:34AM
https://ift.tt/31y1E1R
Making change: Portland’s Feed the Mass chef feeds thousands for free, but he’s just getting started - OregonLive
"feed" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2z3xEQN
https://ift.tt/2yko4c8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Making change: Portland’s Feed the Mass chef feeds thousands for free, but he’s just getting started - OregonLive"
Post a Comment