Rollie Wesen on Transformational Culinary Education

Work Forces

Rollie Wesen is Executive Director of the Jacques Pépin Foundation and a professor at Johnson & Wales University (JWU) in Providence, Rhode Island. The Foundation supports culinary education through community-based culinary training networks, with a particular focus on workforce development. Rollie also teaches culinary labs and academics at JWU's College of Food Innovation & Technology. Rollie shares the mission and work of the Jacques Pépin Foundation, his approach to teaching at JWU, and how his work in these two realms authentically integrate to impact workforce development.

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Transcript:

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Workforces, I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in.

Julian: Welcome to the third episode of Work Forces. On today's episode, we're speaking with Rollie Wesen. He's executive director of the Jacques Pépin Foundation and a professor at Johnson & Wales University here in Providence, Rhode Island. Full disclosure, Rollie is a very close friend along with his wife, Claudine Pépin. You know, Rollie, it has been fascinating, thrilling to watch your career journey unfold. I say and I mean it that Rollie is a living, breathing, promising practitioner of workforce development and brings to life what people like me have been arguing for years. So it's really a pleasure to have you on this show.

Rollie Wesen: Great, well, I'm happy to be here.

Kaitlin: Thanks so much for joining us today, Rollie. We're so glad you can join us. To kick us off, can you please tell us a bit about your story and your background?

Rollie: I took a pretty typical path to becoming an executive chef. I got a degree in literature and then found out that I needed to get a job. And so after college, I started working in restaurants. And soon after that, I realized that what I wanted to do more than anything else was to just travel, and that the skills that I had learned in restaurants were portable skills. They were things that I could take with me anywhere I wanted to go and that they would be useful in helping me to get a job. And so that was sort of the beginning of my acceptance of my role in food service. I ended up spending 20 years working in restaurants of all different kinds. I worked my way up to some very elegant places. I worked at a one-star Michelin restaurant in London for six months. I did a stage at a three-star Michelin restaurant, La Maison Troisgros in the south of France for a few weeks. I worked in some of the finest restaurants in New York City, including Gramercy Tavern and the Rainbow Room. I worked for a lot of celebrity chefs. And basically what my experience working in all those restaurants taught me was that the hospitality community is very welcoming in a lot of ways. It's hard work, but it's very rewarding work. And as I progressed through that, and ultimately I think everyone in food service bumps up against this particular question, which is... How long do I want to keep working on my feet for 10 to 12 hours a day for six or seven days a week? And is that sustainable for the long run? And so as I started to sort of approach that question, which may be, you know, in my mid-40s, late 40s, I decided that education might be a good place for me to go. So I ended up taking a job at Johnson & Wales University here in Providence and started as a culinary instructor. I worked my way up, I got my master's degree in education, and then I went on to get my doctorate in educational leadership, and worked my way up to full professor. So I've been at Johnson & Wales now for 13 years, and teaching culinary arts to Johnson & Wales students. Concurrently with that, the other piece that is a big part of my life now is in 2016, which was the same year that I started my doctorate at Johnson & Wales, I also founded the Jacques Pépin Foundation, which in retrospect was kind of like, really, was that such a good idea to start those two things at the same time? Maybe not, maybe not. On the other hand, if I hadn't started them at the same time, I'm not sure that I would have done both of them because they were both very, very taxing for those subsequent years. And the Jacques Pépin Foundation is fully committed to this idea of supporting culinary education and supporting hospitality. When we started the foundation, we recognized, well, I should say, I went to Jacques and I said, okay, Jacques, you're one of the foremost chefs of our time. You've written 35 cookbooks. You have logged hundreds of hours on television. You're one of the most recognizable, iconic chefs of all time, perhaps. You are one of the premier educators in culinary arts of all time. What are we gonna do? We've got, we started this foundation. What are we gonna do? And I sort of presented Jacques a menu of things that we could do. I said, we could focus on food education in elementary school and food studies and food literacy, or we could support culinary education in high schools and career and technical schools that are offering training in culinary education, or we could help kids get scholarships who wanna go to university or you know, there's a whole variety of different things that we could do. We could help people who just got out of jail, you know, learn how to cook and get the skills that they need to get jobs. And he said, that's the one. That's the one that I wanna do. I wanna help people who want to work, learn the skills that they need to get a job in food service. The reason that we knew about this is because I had already been volunteering my time. So I've been working at Johnson & Wales since 2011. I was at Johnson & Wales for five six years and I had been volunteering my time at what we call a community kitchen at the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. And what that community kitchen did or offered was a twelve to sixteen week course that they offered to low-income individuals to learn basic operations in kitchens and basic fundamental skills. And I realized while I was working there is that that particular program was an enormous win-win-win. I know everybody throws that phrase around all the time, but this truly is a win-win-win in the sense that you have people that want to work who feel excluded from the workforce, who get to learn the skills that they need, and those skills that they need benefit them and their families and their communities because it enriches them, it gives them a sense of purpose, it leads to better health outcomes, it gives them the opportunity to get jobs. It benefits society because you have a person that's low income who's excluded from the workforce who is now gainfully employed in the workforce. And it benefits the industry that I love, the hospitality industry, which currently right now has one million vacancies. There are one million job vacancies in food service right now. And so food service is desperate for workers and you have these people, three, four, five million, depending on whose number you look at that are excluded from the workforce, that just need a few skills that can get a job. So I found this to be an incredibly compelling idea. It was incredibly compelling to be able to leverage all of Jacques's teachings and his role as an educator to help these people. And from a foundation nonprofit point of view, it's just an easy sell. That is, you know, if I say to somebody like, oh, I run the Jacques Pippin Foundation, they're like, oh, I've heard of him. He's the French guy. I was like, yeah. And what we do is we teach culinary skills to people who want to get jobs. And they're like, oh my God, that's so nice. And like, yeah, and we support a network of 120 organizations across the country. And they're like, oh my God. And yeah, we've given out over a million dollars in pass-through grants to these organizations all around the country. And they're benefiting not only from our curricular materials, but also money that we donate and also the validation of having Jacques’ name hanging on their door. And people are like, oh my God, where do I write my check? You know, it's been really great. And it's super rewarding and super satisfying. And I just feel really great about where we're at with the foundation and what I've been able to accomplish at Johnson & Wales as well.

Julian: It's incredible what you've geared up in such a short time. Tell us about some of the successes you're seeing in the work with the foundation.

Rollie: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty spectacular. All of these organizations that we support, and like I said, We support a network of over 120. Our network partner is called Catalyst Kitchens. And Catalyst Kitchens is a program, now an independent, freestanding nonprofit, that offers consulting services and shares best practices within the network. So individual organizations subscribe to Catalyst Kitchens and then they get this whole host of benefits. One of the benefits that they get is that they get introduced to us and we have the potential to offer them grant money and offer them cookbooks and offer them videos and offer them other instructional materials and curricular materials. What's interesting is that every one of these community kitchens is very individual. They have their own perspective on what's important to them in their community. For example, we support the Pittsburgh Community Kitchen and 99 percent of their student clients are previously incarcerated. So they're a pipeline out of jail into the workforce. We support Hot Bread Kitchen in New York City and 99% of their student clients are immigrant women who actually want to use the skills that they have already to become entrepreneurs. And many of them go on to like open their own bakeries and open their own restaurants with the skills that they brought with them. And every one of these organizations is different. We support the Mat-Su Housing Coalition in Alaska. And that's all in support of Native Americans who are trying to find work and get training so that they can get jobs. And so it really varies quite a lot from organization to organization. Generally, their success rates are super high. They have, I would say, in the neighborhood of 60 to 70% completion rate for their 12 to 16 week programs. And all of them, I believe, have a 90% or above placement rate of their students. So the cohorts are relatively small. The cohorts can be anywhere from like eight to 20. And there aren't very many of these organizations that manage more than three cohorts in a year. So we're really only talking about like 50 students per program per year. But the success rate is super high. Of those 50 students, they're all finishing the program and they're all getting placed in gainful employment.

Julian: What are the challenges these organizations these organizations are facing and that you're seeing from your seat?

Rollie: Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of challenges. In fact, the culinary training part is the easy part. When you get the students into the kitchen, they love to be in the kitchen and they love to play with food. And it's usually pretty easy for most of these organizations to attract a chef or an instructor who wants to be there with them to do that work. It's pretty easy to find people who have talent and skills to do that work in that all of the culinary programs at the art institutes around the country closed in the last five years. Many other large schools have shut down. There's lots of chefs like me who are tired of working in restaurants who wanna do something good and useful and productive and helping society that are available to teach in these kitchens. So that part is actually the easy part. The harder part is that all of these programs also offer life skills training. So there's a little bit of gen ed in there. There's how to write a resume. And there's, some of them it's down to like how to take care of yourself. Like they offer, FareStart in Seattle has a whole closet of toiletries and other sundry items that they're helping people with because they're homeless. And in order to come to the program, they have to take a shower and use deodorant before they come into the classroom. Childcare is an issue. It's hard for people who really want to take the program who have kids to find childcare. And so some of them offer free childcare. Transportation is an issue. Some of them have a hard time actually getting to the site. Um, uniforms are sometimes an issue. For example, There's a program and this was one of our actual, like our first really, or one of our first really like concrete moves, which still pleases me to this day. There's an organization in Boston called NECAT, which is the New England Center for Arts and Technology. And basically they're a culinary training program. They don't really do much else other than culinary training. But the director called me and said, you know, we need a washing machine. And I said, oh, you need a dishwasher? Like I can probably hook you up with somebody has commercial dishwashers, and she said, no, we need a washing machine. We need a clothes washer. And I was like, oh, what's that about? And she said, well, many of our students are homeless and they can't come to class with clean uniforms. And so we need a place for them to be able to wash their uniforms. So we're the Jacque Pépin Foundation. We got on the phone. We got in touch with the powers that be at Whirlpool, and within a month, a commercial washer and dryer was donated from Whirlpool in support of their program. And, you know, it wasn't financially, it wasn't such a big deal. Like, I mean, that whole package costs, you know, three or $4,000. And we could have written them a check and they could have bought it. But in a certain sense, that concrete piece of saying like, this is the thing that we need, and we were able to activate our network and find that thing and get that thing donated to them. And it really made an immediate difference in the students' lives and in the instructors' lives and in the life of the program. It's pretty interesting. I mean, like I said, every one of these organizations is unique and we love hearing their stories and reading their stories. We get about 50 grant applications a year and that's always a joy for us to read through and see what amazing work these amazing people are doing all across the country. And then the hard part is we have to decide who we can afford to fund, and how many of those 50 we can fund every year.

Kaitlin: And I think you're getting to a really critical piece, right? Which is how do you provide all the supports that are needed for people to really be able to engage in the education you're trying to provide as well, and making sure all of those wraparound supports are available for all individuals and recognizing that their needs are very different. So, thank you so much for laying out both the successes you're seeing and how to address some of the challenges that you're seeing as well. In addition to your work at the Jacques Pépin Foundation, can you also speak to your work at Johnson & Wales and the connections you're seeing in your work across the university and the foundation?

Rollie: I'm very proud of Johnson & Wales. And especially like right now, I feel like Johnson & Wales is at a nice inflection point themselves in that in the last few years, we have begun to expand our definition and our understanding of what culinary education is at Johnson & Wales. You know, culinary education is pretty interesting and Julian probably has some knowledge, some long-term knowledge around this as well, but when I did my doctoral dissertation, my research was on fundamental learning outcomes for short-term community-based culinary training programs. So basically, I was doing research specifically designed to serve this community kitchen population that we have been supporting through the foundation. And so I did a mixed methods research and came up with sort of a set of criteria that should be essential outcomes for all of these programs to commit to. Part of what was interesting about doing that research was the realization that there is very little research out there about career and technical education. Like nobody is doing good robust studies about what are the best types of programs, how do they help the most people. You know, what are the best curricula to get these people to advance? One of the things I love about what's happening at Johnson & Wales is this expansion of our understanding of culinary education. And that's represented by, for one thing, we have a brand new program in our College of Culinary Arts, which is now called our College of Food Innovation & Technology, recently rebranded. And the program is called, is a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Food Systems. And we really fought hard for a long time to get that program, to bring that program to life. Of course, there was always the question like, well, what jobs are there for the students that go in this program? And the fact of the matter is, is that anybody that's paying attention knows that there are tons of jobs that have sustainability in the job title. And there's more and more all the time that have sustainability dot dot dot food system in the job title. Right? This is a really big, important problem in the food system. Climate change is a huge concern, environmental sustainability is a huge concern, overfishing is a huge concern. All of these big concerns in the food system need to be understood by the next generation of hospitality and food service professionals. So we started this program. I teach several courses in the program. One of them is a lab course, which we call Conscious Cuisine, and it's basically about getting chefs to think about all of the decisions that they make in their kitchen that have an impact in the food service. So we teach about whole animal butchery. We teach about all of the different species of seafood that we could be using that we're not using and bycatch. We talk about food waste and what things get thrown away and how we can repurpose them and turn them into food items that we sell. We talk about economics of food production. So they have a food truck challenge where they have to produce an item that costs $2 or less that's nutritious and helpful and that they can sell. So Conscious Cuisine is a lab that forces the students who are on track to become food service professionals to think about the decisions that they make in their professional environment and how that impacts the food system. The other course that I teach which I'm super proud of is called Cultivating Local Food Systems. And that course is an academic course which again... It starts the students off by challenging them to think about all of the problems that we have in the food system. We introduce them to a little bit of the history of industrial agriculture, and then begin to introduce them to all of these issues, whether that is food insecurity, or food education and literacy, or environmental sustainability, or overfishing, or climate change. All of the food policy, the Farm Bill, we introduce them to all of these different sort of tangential issues that are around the food system that are not just the throughput of farmer grows it, it gets harvested, it gets processed, chef buys it, somebody eats it. We understand that concept of the food system, but the food system is hugely more complex than that. $1.2 trillion a year spent in the United States and within the food system. So we introduce them to all of those issues and then I get them to sort of drill down. I'm like... pick one, like what is the thing that really drives you? What's the thing that gets you out of bed and gets you worried in the middle of the night? Is it food insecurity? Is it that people are not learning how to cook anymore? Is it access to food? Is it food deserts? Like what's the thing, right? And so they pick one of those issues and then I drive them towards discovering the policies that are associated. So they're doing deep dives on the farm bill and federal and state and local regulations to find out how those regulations impact that thing. And then I activate my network that I've developed from the foundation to support their learning. So at that point I say, oh, you're really interested in community gardens? Well, the foundation supports Southside Community Land Trust, and it's only two miles here from Johnson & Wales’ campus. And what they do is they help immigrants establish gardens in their own communities so that they can grow the food that they know and have good, healthy, nourishing food to feed their families. And then I get the students to go out and volunteer for that organization for 20 hours. And then at the end of the course, the end of the semester, they come back and they tie all of this together. They say, here's the issue. Here's why it's a problem. Here are the policies that are associated with the problem. Here are the types of organizations that are doing the work to solve the problem. Here is the organization that I got to know really well when I did my volunteer hours that are solving the problem. Here's what's working. Here are the challenges that they're facing. Here are some recommendations I have for how they could do their work better and be more successful. And when they give that report, the students are so inspired by that point. It's like amazing. They come back and they're like, oh my God. I loved working with them. There's so many great people and they're doing such great work and it was so fun and they offered me a job and I'm gonna continue to volunteer and I'm gonna go home to my hometown in Lancaster, PA and I'm gonna start a community land trust there and I'm gonna put community gardens in the town where I grew up. And I'm like, yes, right? That's exactly what we want. We want these hungry Gen Xers and millennials who want to save the world to see the path. This is how you save the world. Here you go. You care about this, there's a path. The path exists already. Start walking, get on the path, let's go. So it's been great.

Kaitlin: It's amazing to hear, right? Just how you go from taking almost like a multi-system approach and thinking about the policy and thinking about the practice and thinking about what does this look like on the ground and how can you translate this to your own community? Just bringing that together for students at the university, I can see how it might. It's a class that you love to teach. That truly applied element sounds amazing and it is so rewarding to teach with that applied element. Related to that, what's your advice regarding practical steps that each of us who care about solving workforce issues should be doing to make ourselves forces on these matters? What are a few steps that you would recommend that we could take?

Rollie: You really have to understand that the system is super complex. And there's all kinds of barriers in all kinds of places. And it's hard to wrap your head around all the different barriers that exist. You know, Southside Community Land Trust was trying to help people who wanted to have chickens because the places that they came from, they always had like a few chickens in their yard. And that was a source of food and the chickens ate the table scraps and then they gave eggs and then when they were too old to give eggs then they became food themselves. And what they did was they went to the city government and they said, we need to change the zoning laws so that anybody who lives in Providence can have two to four chickens because it was illegal. And some of these illegalities, some of these laws that are on the books are archaic. There was probably a point where there were too many live animals in the city of Providence. And they were like, nope, no more live animals. But that was probably 150 years ago, right? And so they went and they lobbied the state legislature and the city legislature to get the law changed. And now it's legal to have chickens in your backyard in Providence. And it seemed like such a small thing, but somebody had to think of that is a piece that can actually improve lives. And, you know, I think all of us that work in nonprofits and think about the momentum of movements, you know, we have these classic representatives that help us, you know, that we have Gandhi and we have Margaret Mead and, you know, we have all these folks who have shown us that it just takes one person with a really important idea to start a trend to gain momentum, to gather others around them, to really foment real change. And so I think if you are truly passionate about workforce development, that you can find a nugget of activity that you can push forward that will make a difference. And I think everyone should believe that they can make a difference. Everyone should believe that whatever the one thing is that they see. that needs to be changed probably should be changed and that they have the capacity to change it if they just put enough energy into changing that one thing.

Julian: Yeah, it's funny, Rollie, listening to you speak and kind of thinking about even the words I use when I frame this discussion about you being this kind of living, breathing, you know, promising practitioner of workforce, a really key piece, a lot of people who listen to this podcast are, I mean, they're coming from all walks, community, employers, academics. I think you're a really great model for the academics in the sense that, you know, that it really is about that connection to kind of the hands-on. I mean, I love that your students are being introduced to this world that, you know, in this case, you happen to have built with the foundation. It's very compelling. And I just, I can't imagine, I mean, it seems to me that there's academics all over this country, all over the world. that can be doing this in their respective communities with their students and helping the community, building the workforce at multiple levels. So it's, you know, applause to you, Rollie. It's really amazing stuff.

Rollie: Yeah, well, thanks. I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about it is that the, you know, every academic, every good teacher is focused on this idea of like, we need to create real experiences for our students, right? They're desperate to figure out how to bring real experiences to their students. And I think if you just, it takes more work for sure to take your students on field trips and to get your students connected to external organizations and you've got hoops that you have to jump through at your host institution and you have hoops that you have to jump through with the organization that you wanna work with. But that work is so rewarding. in the sense that once you get those connections established, I mean, we haven't been teaching this particular program for very long, but every teacher does that. One of the most joyous moments is that when that one kid that you taught five years ago comes back and says, oh my God, Chef Wiesen, you totally changed my life. That one day that you made the duck stock was just mind blowing for me. And you're like, okay, well. I don't really remember that day, but I'm glad you do. So when you create these experiences for people and you get them connected to the real world, like I said, every instructor, professor, teacher is trying to create those experiences. They're out there waiting. They're sitting there waiting to be grasped. Tangentially to that, when I was creating this Cultivating Local Food Systems course, I had so many people tell me like, oh, you'll never get the nonprofits to accept volunteers. They don't want a volunteer that's only going to be there for 20 hours. That doesn't make any sense at all. Absolutely not true. A hundred percent not true. I started connecting with these nonprofits and they were like, we would love to have a Johnson & Wales student. We would love to have a more robust relationship with Johnson & Wales. We would love to show these young people what we do. We would love to create a pipeline to get young people involved with what we do. Now they're like, are you just teaching that class again this semester? When can I expect your students? Right. And so I think that, I think a lot of people, uh, if you, if you're optimistic, you're more likely to grasp these opportunities and to create these pathways and, and to create opportunities. Uh, it's very easy to be defeatist and be like, the problem is too big. I can't move the machinery of my government. I can't move the machinery of my institution. I'd say just do it. It's possible.

Julian: Quite a proclamation and pretty straightforward. Rollie, as we're wrapping up the conversation now, how can listeners learn more about your work? We're very present in the internet. Our foundation website is just www.jp.foundation. That's Jacques Pépin, jp.foundation. We've got a pretty strong social media presence on Instagram and Facebook and... One of the things about Jacques is that he is such an interesting human. You know, like he should have been the most interesting person in the world on that beer commercial. I mean, he does so many, so many different things. He's an accomplished painter and he's published 35 books and he is on television and he does culinary education. You know, and he, you know, just during the, since the pandemic started, he produced what we call our Cooking at Home series. And he did over 300 individual video recipes that he shot in his home kitchen in the last three years. And that's been a really great driver for the foundation because that's something that we can offer to the public and that's also something that we can offer to our community kitchen partners to make it part of their curricula and their technical training. So there's a lot of ways to reach out to us. We have a membership. You can join the foundation as a member. It's super affordable at $60 a year is the opening rate for that. And for that $60 you get access to hundreds of videos and recipes that are available to our members only. And we have a great newsletter that you get and all that kind of stuff. But if you go to our website, you can look at our membership and see there's a lot of other benefits that you can partake of as well.

Julian: We'll include a link to the site and your social pages in the podcast notes. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Rollie: It's been great talking to you guys and I appreciate everything that you've done too. This is a big problem, this idea of people excluded from the workforce. You hear people talking about not having the employees that they need. One of our grantees is an organization called Edwin’s in Cleveland. And he gave a very compelling speech not long ago that said, in food service, we don't have an employee problem. We have a leadership problem. If there were more leaders that were willing to take in people that want to work and mentor them and give them the skills that they need to perform well in the job setting, we wouldn't have nearly as big of an employment problem as we have. So it's not necessarily employment. It's about leaders and finding people who are willing to be good mentors to the people who need the skills.

Julian: Well said, well said. Well, thank you, Rollie. So appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.

Kaitlin: Thank you.

Rollie: Absolutely. My pleasure.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Workforces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.