The Teaching Kitchen

January 27, 2026

The Teaching Kitchen® at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House helps food assistance programs and nonprofits in NYC adopt a farm-to-institution model and incorporate more healthy, local ingredients into their meals. 

The training series is one of the many services provided by the Neighborhood House, which is one of the country’s oldest settlement houses. Founded in 1894 as a no-cost kindergarten for immigrant families, the organization has expanded its programming over the years to include senior services, adult education, and support for unhoused individuals. They also have a robust meal service program that feeds thousands of community members every year. 

Around 15 years ago, their kitchen transitioned to a farm-to-institution model so clients could enjoy more sustainably-sourced ingredients. This caught the attention of other institutions who wanted to expand community members’ access to healthy, locally-sourced food. Thus, the Teaching Kitchen was created to help other kitchens around the city to learn their methodologies. 

The course is led by Evelyn García, Sarah Jackson, and Jacqueline Tris. Garcia is a Culinary Institute of America graduate with years of experience in restaurants and food education. Throughout her career, she has helped connect schools, nonprofits, and kitchens to local ingredients like the ones she frequently enjoys as a Hudson Valley resident. She has worked with the Neighborhood House for almost eight years and helped to develop many aspects of the Teaching Kitchen’s comprehensive curriculum. Jackson joined the program in 2025 and has worked for many years as a chef and educator. Tris also joined in 2025, bringing years of food media experience and providing additional support with material translation into Spanish

“Our main focus is to help train the directors, cooks, and anyone who oversees or supports meal programming of these nonprofit organizations that serve government-funded meals, to integrate fresher, more scratch-made meals — but most importantly, do this without increasing the cost,” Garcia explained. “It's very safe to say that a lot of organizations are already working on a very limited budget, with a lot of barriers at hand, whether it's staffing challenges, equipment challenges, or budgeting in general. So we’re meeting these organizations where they are and being strategic on how we can best support them.”

Kitchen managers, chefs and other staff members who help run government-funded programs can participate in the course free of charge. It begins with an in-person session with the Teaching Kitchen team. Participants first introduce themselves and explain how their kitchen and meal programs operate. Next they partake in a hands-on demo to make some of the recipes developed by the Neighborhood House kitchen staff. The recipes are designed to be diverse, delectable and healthful, ranging from flavorful veggie fritatas, loaded grain salads, healthy carrot cake cookies, and cheesy pastel azteca. They’re also easily replicable, customizable and scalable for different kitchen settings and dietary needs.

Six months later, the team will visit the trainees to see how they’ve utilized what they learned from the course in their own kitchens. They’ll also help them strategize how they can further incorporate farm-to-institution practices into their work. All the while, trainees have access to lesson plans, videos from the course, and an online cookbook of the Neighborhood House’s recipes available in English and Spanish.

This course cadence allows the Teaching Kitchen team to tailor their training to participants’ schedules as well as the unique barriers and budgets of their respective organizations. 

The Neighborhood House is fully staffed the majority of the time, and that's not always the case for everyone else,” Garcia explained. “We're very transparent on how we can realistically provide support with the resources that we built. If others don't have them, we build them for any organization that needs additional support.”

The Teaching Kitchen has trained nearly 300 organizations, cumulatively serving or impacting over 35 million meals. Garcia, Jackson, and Tris recently completed an on-site training session with staff from NYC nonprofit Project Renewal and are looking forward to upcoming trainings with participants from Jamaica Hospital Medical Center’s Food Is Medicine Program and Cornell Cooperative Extension’s nutritionist team. They are also eager to provide even more meal resources to community members in need. 

“Food insecurity is soon to be at its all time high,” said Garcia. “So here at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, we're looking to increase the number of community meals that we're serving — whether it's to our older adult centers, to the families of our early childhood center, or to the community at large.”

More about the Teaching Kitchen and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House’s extensive programming can be found here.