Page 45 - BusinessWest December 12, 2022

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Season of Giving
The Hampden County Bar Assoc. held its annual Toast to the Season on Nov. 17 at the Student Prince in Springfield. Members were asked to bring a donation to Toys for Tots, which resulted in a large donation to the Toys for Tots program. The toy donations were dropped off at Western Mass News, and cash donations were made directly to Toys for Tots. Pictured below: from left, Meaghan Murphy, Kathryn Crouss, Christopher Pierson, and Ryan O’Hara. At right: from left, Jonathan Allen, Judge Barbara Hyland, and Ellie Rosenbaum.
Culinary
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business. She now also runs Crave res- taurant on High Street in Holyoke.
Leigh also said the institute is work- ing with Holyoke Medical Center on putting together some professional development for nurses and nutri- tionists, planning to package it as a non-credit course with possible grant support.
The facility also recently partnered with the Boys & Girls Club by helping lay out its new kitchen and hosting the club’s eighth-graders at the Cubit.
“We’re trying to be a community partner,” Leigh said, adding that the school started preparing Thanksgiv- ing to-go packages — everything but the turkey for a family of four — to
raise money for the President’s Student Emergency Fund at HCC, which assists thousands of students with basic needs.
clearly cost less than at Johnson & Wales or CIA,” he noted. “But maybe we can get grant funding for it.”
At the same time, Leigh and his
and go to those six or eight voke-tech schools, and we’ll try to do the same with the non-culinary students at the other high schools,” he said. “They might only hear about Johnson & Wales and CIA, where the price starts at $50,000 or $60,000.”
With the need for culinary talent more critical than ever before, and the cost of a community-college education within reach for most, he hopes HCC has a winning message for those young people.
As Hindle said, the work isn’t easy, but it’s a field where those with a pas- sion can thrive. u
Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]
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DECEMBER 12, 2022 45
“Each chef brings something unique to the table, and
they teach us not only what works best for them, but also
”
team are trying to be more purposeful in recruitment, an ongoing effort, as he said, to get the HCC MGM Culinary Arts Center “packed to the gills.”
“We’re trying to tag-team a faculty member and an admissions person
what might work best for us.
The program is reaching out to the community in other ways as well, such as a plan to offer professional-devel- opment opportunities for culinary-arts teachers in several vocational and tech- nical schools in the region. “It would