Kids in the Kitchen

A multidisciplinary, collaborative project that explores the solutions to food insecurity and poor diet in urban areas.

By: Tiffany Friese, Matthew Carella, Jonathan Pacheco, Hun Xue

In our country, food is grown in abundance, there has never been a time in history that matches the nutritional resources that are sitting on grocery store shelves today. And yet – 13 million American children face nutritional deficits everyday. Based on our team research, we found that poorer Chicago neighborhoods had higher risks of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity as opposed to more well off neighborhoods. The problems that lead to these outcomes are complex and need many different solutions to alleviate, however, my team sought to find solutions to one piece of the very complicated puzzle: child hunger.

We decided to create an after-school cooking program called Kids in the Kitchen.

Kids in the Kitchen is a semester long, after-school cooking program that meets once a week, every Thursday from 3:30-5pm. The goal of the program is to introduce healthy eating and cooking techniques from a young and impressionable age. If cooking healthy meals is seen as something that is not only doable but is a fun and social activity it will be more attractive and hopefully will lead children to form their own healthy habits that they can implement on their own and spread awareness in their own community.

Program Assets

Journey Map

This journey map details the story of Sammy and the experience of an afternoon in the program!

I hand-drew and hand-wrote the labels because our team felt that it lended to a more organic and natural feel which was one of the building blocks of the organization.