HAVE Culinary Training Society: A Catering Business That Exists to Train Its Own Staff

A Vancouver non-profit on Powell Street providing food service training and employment to people in the Downtown Eastside facing barriers to work, funded substantially by selling catering.

Two Businesses in One Kitchen

HAVE Culinary Training Society is a non-profit organisation offering affordable, quality catering while providing food service job training and employment to individuals in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who experience barriers to employment.

The structure is the point. The catering operation is a real commercial business with paying customers and competitive pricing. It is also the training environment, which means the people learning the trade are doing so by cooking food that someone is actually paying for and expecting to be good.

That is a materially different model from classroom training followed by a job search. A trainee in this kitchen is producing to a customer standard from the start, and the organisation’s reputation depends on the work.

Alongside catering, it prepares shelter and community meals, serving organisations providing food to people who need it.

Two Distinct Training Routes

The programmes are structured for different starting points.

An eight-week culinary training programme provides entry-level preparation for people beginning in the industry. Alongside it runs an ITA Professional Cook 1 programme, which carries recognised certification through British Columbia’s industry training authority.

That second route matters. A certificate recognised across the province is portable, which changes what a graduate can do with it. The first programme builds the foundation; the second produces a credential an employer anywhere in BC will recognise.

For a sector with persistent labour shortages, a pipeline producing certified cooks is useful to more than the graduates.

The Part That Involves Employers Directly

The organisation publishes a dedicated route for businesses to hire its graduates.

That is the mechanism this magazine’s readers can act on, and it is worth stating plainly what it offers. Restaurants, caterers, hotels and institutional kitchens across the Lower Mainland report difficulty filling kitchen positions. An organisation producing trained, certified, work-ready cooks is a recruitment channel most employers have never approached.

The graduates have also worked in a commercial kitchen under pressure, which is the part a classroom cannot replicate and the part employers most need to know about.

There is a second route for businesses: buying the catering. An organisation ordering lunches for a meeting, food for an event or regular office catering can meet that need from a supplier where the revenue funds training. That is social procurement requiring no policy, no budget line and no committee.

Governance and Scale

The organisation is led by executive director Amber Anderson, with a board including hospitality industry figure Ian Tostenson and chartered accountant Janice Walsh, and an operations manager, Candase Anderson, running the kitchen side.

A board combining industry knowledge and financial expertise is the right composition for a social enterprise, because the organisation must function as a commercial kitchen and as a non-profit simultaneously, and those two demands pull in different directions.

Why This Model Keeps Appearing

HAVE is the second organisation in this series built on the same principle, alongside EMBERS in the same city, which funds its charitable work through a staffing agency.

The shared logic is worth naming. A charity dependent on grants spends leadership time securing the next round rather than delivering the work. A charity operating a business that generates revenue controls its own direction, and the business and the mission reinforce each other rather than competing for attention.

For readers who sit on non-profit boards, which many business owners do, the question is whether the organisation already knows how to do something people would pay for.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.