CHEFS (Conquering Homelessness through Employment in Food Service) is an amazing program run by Episcopal Community Services in the Mission District of San Francisco. Homeless people are trained as chefs so they gain job skills and confidence and transition into society. Guest chefs and other restaurateurs from around the bay area come in teach courses. Here's a great video on the CHEFS program.

A food and travel writer I know, Janice Nieder, is involved with CHEFS and she introduced me to Bill Taylor, the man who runs the program. He invited me down to the Canon Kip Community Center to see see the CHEFS program in action. We had a great lunch of pork tacos followed by a blood orange panna cotta. The center shares its space with a day program for homeless senior citizens. Interns from CHEFS make lunch for them. Sandra Marilyn, who works with Episcopal Community Services the charity that runs these projects, told me that sadly, due to the economy, they are having their food budget cut. Today, the New York Times ran an article You Try to Live on 500K in This Town about economic woes of wealthy New Yorkers, which doesn't illicit much sympathy from the reader,(unless, maybe, you're a garden designer and these were your clients), so it doesn't bode well for my company's upcoming year, but the thought of homeless seniors having less food is really upsetting.

CHEFS has a small plot in the nearby Canon Kip Community Garden, but because students are rotating out, there's an inconsistency and the garden gets forgotten. I told Bill that my company, Prospect & Refuge would volunteer to oversee and work with students to plant and maintain a kitchen garden.

One of the students, Rolf, had been trying to keep some things going there. He pointed out a shallow planting area that had been built up off the ground so that handicapped people could work on it. This would be the herb garden. Since there's space below that's shaded, but seems to have pretty good air circulation, we decided to give shitake logs a try. There is a problem with dogs and small critters, so we might need to make a wood slatted box for them.

In the larger garden space, Bill wanted a variety of specialty greens so that students could harvest really fresh produce and make salads out of them. Apparently, he had a bumper crop of salad greens that got decimated by some urban wildlife. So we'll need to get a net or cage system around them.

We decided to head back from the garden to center as Michael Schreiber was teaching a pastry class that afternoon. Nathan Johnson was also there that day, as he works in the front of restaurants and he's going to be teaching students job hunting and interviewing tips. It's a rough time in the job market, so this graduating class is going to really have to work hard.

But Rolf explained to both Nathan and I, "It's always uphill for us."