Red Artichoke Culinary School & Catering

One thing that we hear over and over again from the homeless is “Where can a get a job?” Now we have an answer. The homeless don’t always have to be the consumers of free meals – they can create a sustainable business out of making and selling simple meals while creating sustainable lives for themselves. Using our existing commercial kitchen, the homeless participants will not only gain job skills and confidence, they will create a sustainable business from their own determination and hard work. Our enterprise is called Red Artichoke Catering, and it will begin with catering pre-school lunches.

Many of our homeless guests at Dorothy's Place face huge barriers to employment.  Our objective with Red Artichoke is three-fold:

• Overcome barriers to food service employment by providing on-the-job training, a ServSafe certification, and at least six months of employment in our catering company to show future employers a commitment to excellence.
• Fill an existing need in our local community. Local private preschools struggle with providing lunches that are healthy and attractive to children because of cost and inavailability of lunch subsidies.
• Create an earned income stream for Dorothy's Kitchen so that our guests are not dependent upon charitable gifts to keep their Kitchen in operation.

Our mission is to love the poor. Our vision is an end to poverty and homelessness through the gentle application of common-sense solutions, like microenterprise.  Enterprise can solve social problems.  Join us and be part of a beautiful solution.

Red Artichoke Catering is still in development with the facilitation of the Academies for Social Enterprise and the support of The California Endowment and Community Foundation for Monterey County. If you are interested in receiving email information about the continuing development of Red Artichoke, please click here.