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Opening Doors, One Meal at a Time

With the right opportunities, a lot can change in 10 years. In 2008, Amal AlTaib was fleeing Sudan with her family, making her way to Cairo, Egypt and then finally the U.S. Now, nearly a decade later on the cusp of 2018, Amal is one of a select group of refugees participating in

CitySeed's Kitchen-to-Farmers' Market Incubator program, a program she said will hopefully offer new opportunities for success here in America.

The new incubator program is a 10-week program that is pulling together professors, industry professionals, refugees, and Sanctuary Kitchen staff and volunteers to help refugees become entrepreneurs in the food industry.

Developed in 2017, Sanctuary Kitchen is a program developed by CitySeed – a nonprofit organization that aims to provide access to fresh food to New Haven residents - in partnership with a network of community volunteers that "promotes and celebrates the culinary traditions, cultures, and stories of refugees resettled in Connecticut, while providing them with economically viable culinary opportunities that have personal income potential."

In addition to working with CitySeed, Sanctuary Kitchen also works closely with Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) in New Haven. The International Association of New Haven has provided support as well, helping to cover some of the costs of starting up cooking classes, and the business incubator program. Kitchen Program Manager Sumiya Khan said Sanctuary Kitchen came together in response to the refugee crisis, and the program has taken off since its inception.

"I wanted to do some kind of cooking education just kind of highlighting their cuisines, providing them with an opportunity to earn some income, and also just developing community around them," she said. "It just seemed like a natural connection that needed to be made."

After pulling together a team and securing grant money, regular events including cooking classes, demonstrations, and supper clubs. The team of community volunteers led by Kahn and others have worked with refugees and immigrants from Syrian, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Jaghori District of Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Eritrea, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Rwanda. The events have been wildly popular, many of them selling out within days of being offered. Some have been sold out in as little as 45 minutes after being posted.

While the events have been a great success, Khan said she still wanted to see one of the original ideas, the Kitchen Incubator Program, come to fruition. Khan said the events are great, but she wanted another opportunity for refugee cooks who were maybe less comfortable doing a class or demonstration to showcase their work and their talents. Because CitySeed has a farmers' market, Khan said she saw the potential to help refugee cooks establish businesses or make their way into the food or restaurant industry.

"It just seemed like a logical idea for refugees who might have a food product or some other idea that they could sell or share through the farmers' market as a vendor or elsewhere. We wanted to provide them with that opportunity," she said. "We are learning as we do this and starting a food business is no easy matter... and refugees are coming here not knowing the language and unfamiliar with the regulations

, and it is hard enough for someone who was born and raised here so we wanted to be able to help them navigate that process."

The program began in October and was designed to help the seven refugee cooks who were selected to participate navigate the world of starting a food business or market a food product from their culinary traditions at the CitySeed market and beyond. Thanks to grant funding, when the program ends the participants will leave with a little seed money to help them get started.

Each week refugees learn a new skill from business planning to food safety training and certification to testing your product. As many of these subjects are complex, Khan said she is thrilled with the number of volunteers who have stepped up to help teach specific courses in including professors from Yale University, CitySeed staff, Gateway Community College staff, and may others.

"The interest and availability of these folks has been really great and we really couldn't have done this without them because they have the expertise and they are willing to share it with us basically as volunteers," she said.

In addition to the instructors, each refugee is paired with a mentor who currently works in the specific refugee's area of interest somewhere in the greater New Haven area. Khan said these mentors help guide the participants and provide them with some good contacts once the program is over.

For Amal, this program is the chance of a lifetime and one she has worked very hard to obtain. After fleeing her home country and making the trek across the world to finally land in New Haven, she started working right away to improve her English skills. Amal's first language is Arabic and while she said she did study some English in her home country, watching her son's language skills progress in his new school here pushed her to work even harder.

"During that time my son was 10

, and he started classes and in just a few months I found him start to communicate with other students and I saw him get better day by day – not fluent English but he can communicate, and I said to myself I must work hard also to improve my language," she said. "I love people and I love to chat with people so for that reason I worked hard to go on with my life and study English as a second language."

She started with English classes with Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) and quickly progressed to Gateway Community College where she started taking higher-level English courses. While she was there, she also took a few cooking classes and recently

earned a certificate in culinary yraining from Gateway, specializing in pastry and dessert. Meanwhile Amal was participating in some of the cooking events at Sanctuary Kitchen and was encouraged to apply to the incubator program. When she got the call that she was accepted, Amal said she was just thrilled.

"I said ok I will apply and after three or four weeks they called me and told me we accepted you in this program

, and I am so excited," she said. "I feel this opportunity will open doors for me for the American world because I know few people but through this program I will come to know more people, some of them from Yale University."

Amal said this program is giving her the chance to gain some professional knowledge, meet new people, learn about other cuisines, and master the tools to manage her own business – maybe a baking business.

"I think I am so lucky to get this chance

, and I am very excited to start this program," she said.

If the first year of the program is a success, Khan said she hopes to secure more funding and continue the program. To learn more about the incubator program, Sanctuary Kitchen, or CitySeed, visit www.sanctuarykitchen.org

Pem McNerney contributed to this article.