The idea came to her while sitting on porch steps in New Orleans. Alexis Krcelic, now 14, and her father were with a church group helping repair a house damaged by Hurricane Katrina. That day, they were grouting floors.
She’d taken a break. While sitting outside, “It popped into my head that I wanted to open a cooking school for kids,” she recalls. Caught up by the idea, Alexis went directly into the house and told her dad, Gene.
“He laughed a little bit and said, ‘OK.’ Because I have a lot of ideas and projects I come up with.”
But she kept thinking about it. She decided she wanted her cooking school to be nonprofit and to reach underprivileged children. “There are already cooking schools for kids who can pay,” she explains.
Classes at her school might one day lead to careers as chefs. But mainly Alexis was interested in teaching kids how to cook and eat healthy for not much money, so they didn’t feel they had to rely on fast food.
They would learn about good nutrition. And the kitchen skills that kids picked up at her school would serve them well a lifetime — for both their health and their budgets.
Even after returning home to Easley, Alexis kept thinking about her idea. She came up with a name for the school: Cook It Forward. Still the problem was, “I didn’t know where to get the money to get started. I’m a 14-year-old girl.”
Then her dad one day read about the Pepsi Refresh Project (www.refresheverything.com). The company was holding a nationwide online competition for grants to good causes. Each month, the public would vote online for 1,000 new ideas, and the top 10 vote-getters in each category would win grants.
Each month up to $1.3 million in all would be awarded. And the top 100 runner-ups in each category would automatically be entered in the next month’s contest for another chance.
The categories are according to the size of the grants, the smallest being $5,000 and the largest, $250,000.
Alexis figured out a budget for her school and then entered the competition for $50,000. She created a Web site (www.refresheverything.com/cookitforward).
As of Friday, Cook It Forward ranked at No. 128 in this month’s $50,000 category. Voting ends March 31.
Alexis has nearly always loved to cook. When she was younger, she conducted pretend cooking shows in her family’s kitchen, like the ones she avidly watched on the Food Network.
At age 10, she took cooking classes and won a chef’s jacket in a cook-off. At age 11, she wanted (and got) a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas. At the store, her mother, Mary, asked out of curiosity, “How many 11-year-olds have you sold these to?”
After high school, Alexis wants to take a year off and do mission work in Africa. Then she hopes to go to Columbia or Harvard University and major in business so one day she can open a bakery in New York City.
It would be the kind of bakery that people stop by after dinner out in a restaurant or when they’re just walking along the street.
With any luck and enough votes, Cook It Forward will be well established by then.
Jeanne Brooks can be reached at (864) 298-4261.
Source
=================================================
Such a nice story of a girl who took-up cooking school and be competitive online.
No comments:
Post a Comment