Students Organize Cooking Classes for Haitian Migrants.
Gwendolyn Strickland, center, observes a Teaching Kitchen instructor explain how to make epis, a Haitian seasoning base.
Students Organize Cooking Classes for Haitian Migrants
School of Public Health dual degree students made the finals of Innovate@BU’s Refugee Challenge, earning funding for their proposal “Community Connection Through Cooking.”
Boston University School of Public Health dual degree student Gwendolyn Strickland (SPH’25, GMS’24) and recent graduate Leah Hollander (SPH’23, MED’23) joined fellow students Hassan Beesley (MED’23) and Heejoo Kang (MED’26) in Innovate@BU’s Refugee Challenge this spring. The group earned $500 in funding for their proposal “Community Connection Through Cooking.”
The proposal was a collaboration between the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine Refugee Wellness Student Group, Boston Medical Center’s (BMC) Refugee Women’s Health Clinic, and BMC’s Teaching Kitchen to offer cooking classes focused on affordability, cultural relevance, and meeting dietary recommendations for pregnant and postpartum Haitian migrants and their families.
Not long after she completed the challenge and graduated with her MPH and MD, Hollander successfully secured an additional $3,000 in funding for the Community Connection project through Innovate@BU’s Project Action program.
Strickland, who currently studies Community Assessment, Program Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (CAPDIE) at SPH, helped to lead the first community cooking class for three refugee families on June 22. Funding earned by the Community Connection team went in part to support transportation costs for class participants, who, in some cases, live in shelters and hotels in different parts of Boston and nearby communities.
Going forward, the team plans to hold more classes as well as a donation drive for kitchen supplies that can be sent home with class participants to ensure they can continue cooking nutritious foods outside the teaching kitchen. The team also looks forward to partnering with another student group from the Refugee Challenge whose proposal “Recipes for Refugees” aligns with their goal to create culturally relevant infographics.
“We were trying to develop creative ways to best incorporate systems we know are successful for increasing social support in a way that matches the specific needs of this population,” said Hollander.
This article was adapted from an article originally written for the BU School of Medicine.
