Cooking is more than a profession for Christa Bruno — it’s a lifestyle. “I was raised in kitchens,” she says.
As a child, she cooked at home with her Sicilian grandmother. At 14, she began working in restaurants — first clearing tables, and then, as she got older, taking orders and bartending. For 10 years, she lived in Italy, where her passion for food grew. When she returned to the United States, she spent 30 years cooking in restaurant kitchens.
Now she teaches young adults — many of whom are experiencing reentry from the criminal justice system — how to cook and operate in a professional kitchen.
Bruno is a culinary arts instructor with the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) in Baltimore, Maryland. NCIA is one of 11 organizations supported through the Compass Rose Collaborative, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and implemented by FHI 360’s National Institute for Work and Learning. It aims to improve education and employment outcomes for young adults (ages 18 through 24) who are returning to their communities after incarceration or other involvement with the justice system.
“Systemic inequality in the justice system really starts long before a young person is arrested,” says Heidi Cooper, a technical officer with FHI 360’s justice programs. “It can begin in the schools, through school discipline measures, and lead all the way through the juvenile justice system — through arrests, through the courts, through incarceration and even post-services. There are inequalities that build at each of these stages.”
NCIA is working to level the playing field by removing barriers to work and education for young people coming out of the justice system. The program connects participants to experiences they may have missed while incarcerated, such as developing professional skills — working in a restaurant kitchen, for example. For Bruno, this means helping her students “understand this profession, and giving them the tools necessary to follow their path and their passion and tap into their creative self.”
Bruno’s enthusiasm for cooking is infectious — as it is for Raneisha Crutchfield, one of her students, who is drawn to cooking because of its creative possibilities.
Crutchfield’s favorite dish to make is macaroni and cheese. She is inspired by her family, who cooks a lot of soul food — “the food that touches your heart” — and is motivated by the idea of sharing what she likes to do with others. “Food brings people together,” she says.
For Crutchfield, the program has taught her lessons that extend beyond the kitchen. “You have to stay focused and use all the resources that you have provided for you.”
Bruno enjoys watching as her students master technical kitchen skills — and as their appreciation for and dedication to cooking deepen.
Even after the three-month program ends, Bruno and her fellow instructors continue their relationships with their students. “We’re still calling them, we’re still reaching out to them; they’re still reaching out to us. We’ll call and check on their jobs, see how their progress is going. It’s a family unit.”
For both Bruno and Crutchfield, cooking has the power to bring the community together.
Workforce programs like NCIA “are not just training workers, but bringing a young person back into a community with all of the factors that that entails, from the practical — like finding food, finding housing — to the more intangible, like rebuilding those community connections,” says Cooper.
“If we do work together, we’ll have a lot of greatness in our community.”
Young people coming out of the justice system “deserve to have a happy, successful, interesting career or a sustaining job, if that’s what they want,” says Cooper. “And as community members, we should be taking advantage of what they have to offer.
Footnotes
The Compass Rose Collaborative (Young Adult Reentry Partnership) is 100 percent funded by the U.S. Department of Labor in the amount of $4,298,500. No other sources of funding support this program. All photos and videos are credited to Kyle Pompey for FHI 360.