Our Story
Here's Ours
The Inspiration
It all started in 2021 under the umbrella of San Diego Foster Angels, another nonprofit founded by Lena Goldberg & Peggy Goldsmith to support their 20 years of volunteer work in San Diego’s foster youth services. In the midst of the pandemic, our organization grew to include many homes throughout San Diego County. One home run by the nonprofit Hidden Treasures Foundation stood out to our team.
The Beginning
The Hidden Treasures Foundation was a new safe home struggling to establish itself in such hard times. It served as a trauma recovery therapy home for teenage girls, survivors of human trafficking. San Diego Foster Angels started working with these girls, teaching them yoga. Wanting to pour more into this community, Lena offered her skills as a professional chef to the home. The yoga and cooking classes were a huge success. The girls loved being able to make home-cooked meals and learn from a professional chef.
Lena took this energy and ran with it, seeing the potential in creating a culinary program for the young ladies and other youth in similar situations.
The Growth
A few phone calls later, Lena had a group of chefs around San Diego County on board with the plan. Local chef supply company Chef Works provided us a grant to fund our expenses. Thus, the Chef Angels Culinary Program was born.
In our pilot year, we worked with a group home of teen foster boys undergoing behavior therapy, and a drop-in center serving homeless youth ages 12-24. Through this year, we got a glimpse of what we could turn this into – a program to inspire underserved youth across the county to follow in our culinary footsteps while gaining invaluable experience and life skills.
Since it started, Chef Angels has provided countless youth with professional culinary education in over 60 classes. Even with such incredible growth in just a few years, the Chef Angels team knows that there is more in store for us.
