As we continue to celebrate our 25th anniversary, this month we’re taking a closer look at Second Helpings’ founding in 1998. We recently sat down with Kristen Kienker, one of Second Helpings’ founders to reflect on her experience during the organization’s earliest days.
Chef Kristen Kienker in Second Helpings’ first kitchen, 1998
As a representative of the American Culinary Federation’s Indiana chapter, Chef Kristen Kienker went to Washington, DC, with chefs representing every state in recognition of Childhood Hunger Day in 1995.
As part of the group’s visit, they toured DC Central Kitchen. “I came back so excited after that visit,” Kristen remembers. “The whole idea to prepare meals from donated ingredients – it just made perfect sense to me.”
Kristen reached out to fellow Indiana ACF members Jean Paison and Bob Koch. “I remember her saying, ‘This is not a project I chose; this project chose me,’” Bob shared.
Together, Kristen, Bob, and Jean got to work recruiting friends and family members to volunteer, visiting other organizations across the country, and recruiting their networks across the culinary industry.
“We sat around Jean’s kitchen table making plans, and I think that was our first ‘board meeting,’” Kristen laughed. Originally, she served as president of the board, but as plans began to come together for the new organization, she envisioned a different role for herself.
“We started putting together job descriptions, and when I read the full job description for the Chef Instructor, I said, ‘I think that’s my job!’ and the others laughed and said, ‘We knew that a year ago!’”
So Kristen left her job as a catering chef and got to work writing Second Helpings’ first Culinary Job Training curriculum before the organization officially opened in April 1998.
Over time, Kristen saw the need to add more durable skills to the program, to set students up for success outside of the kitchen. “I saw so many students just sabotaging themselves, someone would be hugely successful for four weeks and then something would come up or go wrong and they’d crumble…We needed additional support. I could teach the cooking, but we needed things like resume writing and life skills, and we needed partners who could provide that wider range of skills.”
Durable skills have remained a critical element of Culinary Job Training – when the program was restructured last year, the curriculum included a renewed focus on teaching skills like financial literacy, goal setting, communication, and time management, and we work with a variety of partners to provide those lessons.
While serving as the sole instructor in the Culinary Job Training program, Kristen also oversaw the Hunger Relief program and volunteers on her own. “Everything felt like it was by the seat of our pants! We had one van [for both meal delivery and food rescue] and we just tried to cover as much ground as we could.”
While Kristen started out as the sole employee of both programs, now there are more than a dozen staff members operating those programs. And while we have started off with one van, our Food Rescue and Transportation team now operates a fleet of 11 vans and trucks.
Visiting Second Helpings earlier this month, Kristen got to meet students in Culinary Job Training Class 157 as well as several staff and volunteers. “It’s hard to comprehend,” Kristen smiled. “I just never imagined it could be this big. In the beginning, we weren’t able to think that far ahead, we just knew this new organization needed to happen.”
Although there has been enormous growth since Second Helpings’ earliest days, so much has stayed the same.
While sustainability wasn’t the buzzword in 1998 it is now, preventing waste across operations has always been a core value of the organization.
“It was so important to us to use reusable hotel pans [for meal delivery],” Kristen explained. “I remember coordinating with all our partners around the returning and reusing of all those pans. It would have been so much easier to use disposable pans, but preventing that waste felt non-negotiable to us.”
25 years later, we continue to be grateful for the vision Kristen brought to Indianapolis in creating Second Helpings. But she would be the first to say that this organization’s efforts isn’t the result of just one person’s work.
“It takes a city,” Kristen said.
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