Food has a fantastic ability to connect people – whether it’s enjoying the social aspect of sharing a buffet among friends, or cooking a treasured family recipe that has been passed down through generations – it transcends age, race, gender and culture. After all, everyone can appreciate a delicious meal. Migrateful help migrants, refugees and asylum seekers integrate into society by empowering them to teach their cuisines to the wider community. They have been running chef training programmes since April 2017 for those from countries such as Syria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, Cuba and many more, to learn how to teach their cuisines in open cookery classes, and sometimes to corporate and private clients. We chat to founder, Jess Thompson, to find out more.
Migrateful is a social enterprise where asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants teach their traditional cooking to the public. The only requirement that we ask of our chefs is that they have a passion for cooking and we train them up to become professional cookery class teachers. After three months of training they are then ready to teach. We currently have chefs from over 30 different countries. One of the things we aim to do is support them into long term employment, either by running their own catering organisation or helping them to connect with other employment opportunities. The idea came to me when I was running a time bank exchange programme in east London with refugee women. All of them were very educated and had successful careers in their home countries, then faced unemployment in the UK because their qualifications weren’t recognised, or because of language barriers. All of them said they were really keen to teach their community their recipes as they felt so confident to offer them. Plus, lots of people in the UK want to learn how to cook. So, I tried the idea out and there are now around 400 cookery classes with 4,000 participants. All the customers love it and it works well for social enterprise.