Kind Kitchen Youth Culinary Ambassador Internship

This internship supports Kind Kitchen Group's mission to build sustainable youth leaders through a three- tier governance model: Kind Kitchen Group Board (adult oversight) → Youth Advisory Board (youth governance) → KAITs Programming (youth-led service delivery). The project focuses on developing organizational infrastructure and capacity-building systems that enable youth to organize, build community, and create lasting change through food justice work.
Working at the intersection of youth development, community organizing, and governance training, this role centers on supporting the Youth Advisory Board in developing formal organizational systems while strengthening KAITs (Kitchen Assistants in Training) programming as their primary implementation vehicle. The intern will help build the infrastructure needed for authentic youth self-governance while maintaining accountability to adult oversight.
This work addresses the critical question: How do we build sustainable leaders? By creating systems that progressively transfer decision-making power to youth while building their organizational capacity, this project demonstrates that young people can effectively govern their own programming and create meaningful community change when given proper support and infrastructure

Over the course of the internship, the intern organized communications between a Pratt class and Fayetteville elementary---largely helping create dialogue of what school’s vision is for the new garden space and how the engineering class can support that with their practical skills. This included researching new soils beds to purchase for the school and garnering their feedback on it and coming up ideas for how to design the space. They also worked on organizing garden workdays for volunteers from Pratt, and KKG to help set-up the new community garden site at the school. This took the shape of touring potential garden sites, relocating soil from the old garden site to the new one, assembling new soils beds and taking apart the old ones, and confirming access to water sources and supplies. Additionally, the student worked on spearheading the curriculum of the program by creating radish planting pocketbooks for the students, planning lessons, and facilitating/leading lessons on the students’ club days.  At the very lesson on the program, students planted radish seeds to take care of in pairs for the next coming month.