At 30 years old, Ekron Hamilton manages the kitchen at Weston King Neighbourhood Centre, preparing meals for the area’s most vulnerable residents.

But leadership hasn’t always come naturally to him.

“I was really shy, I wasn’t talking to people and didn’t want to participate in anything,” he said, adding that in his late 20s he was underemployed and dependent on Ontario Works.

A year after graduating from the Kitchen Masters culinary training program offered at the Mount Dennis Neighbourhood Centre (MDNC), he is a leader who takes pride in his work and the financial independence it allows him. So when the CEE (Careers Education and Empowerment) Centre for Young Black Professionals, the organization that co-facilitates Kitchen Masters, called to ask him for a favour, he obliged wholeheartedly.

“I love what I do, and I can’t turn my back away from CEE,” he said. “I love them so much.”

That’s how Hamilton ended up in the MDNC’s kitchen with five of the program’s newest batch of graduates and their chef instructor, Gartlet Taylor, on Sept. 11; competing for a second time in a juried cooking competition he won last year. The Black Box Challenge tasks students in teams of two to craft dishes from mystery ingredients for jurors to try. With five students competing, Hamilton rounded out the third team.

Kitchen Masters is a 12-week program that equips Black youth 18 to 29 years old with relevant skills and certification for careers in culinary work. It’s co-delivered by the Hospitality Workers Training Centre (HWTC) and the CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, and doubles as a Second Harvest Kitchen.

That means four days a week, year-round, participants transform donated food into 70 trays of meals to be delivered to shelters in high-need communities. Taylor and his students don’t know what they’ll be cooking each day until a truck delivers their groceries in the morning.

“They’ve learned how to collaborate flavours because with Second Harvest … we have no idea what’s coming on the truck,” Taylor said. “So we get the ingredients from the truck, create menus, create the dishes and send them back out.”

In addition to teaching his students knife skills and culinary techniques like blanching and shocking, roasting, baking, grilling and presentation, Taylor also prepares them for the Black Box Challenge, and the job market, by teaching them how to adapt.

With his partner Everton McDonald, Hamilton served judges a steak and avocado crostini and a dish of mashed sweet potatoes, chicken and vegetables that netted the pair second place in the Black Box Challenge.

Janet Mitchell moved to Canada from the Bahamas last year and lives in Weston. She gained some practical experience working in the kitchen of a resort back home, but had no formal culinary training before enrolling in Kitchen Masters.

“Someday I want to open up a catering company or be a chef,” she said, “so I figured the program would be good to join.”

Mitchell and her partner, Alexia Bridgeman, served up chicken tacos wrapped with lettuce, and grilled steak with mashed sweet potato. They tied for first place with 19-year-old Abdirahman Kulmiye and his partner Therese Beya, who served a deconstructed onion soup and glazed rondelle sweet potatoes with mild and spicy drumsticks.

At the end of the challenge, Taylor surprised Beya with a special award for leadership she displayed throughout the program.

Leadership, in and out of the kitchen, is only one of the soft skills students cultivate during the 12-week program. They also work with mentors on communication, problem solving and resilience, and participate in resumé-writing and job interview workshops.

At the end, Kitchen Masters pairs students with kitchens throughout the city for unpaid job placements that sometimes lead to full-time work. Of over 100 people HWTC has trained through its culinary programs, 78 per cent have landed jobs in the hospitality industry.

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What sets Kitchen Masters apart from HWTC’s other programs is that it serves exclusively Black youth through a partnership with CEE. Jessica Robinson, a social worker with CEE, said programs like Kitchen Masters are crucial for closing labour gaps that contribute to the underrepresentation of Black people in job markets, including hospitality. She said Black youth in Toronto’s priority investment neighbourhoods, of which Mount Dennis is one, often come up against economic and social barriers to career development, including expensive college tuition and a lack of support or awareness of their options.

“For a lot of them, they probably would not have landed a job in the culinary industry or gained the skills otherwise,” she said. “So we partner with organizations like HWTC so our young people can have the opportunity to be in these spaces.”