Connecting Through Cooking: One Step at a Time

The GENconnect Team

Hello once again! My name is Laura Shield and I am a student in Laurier’s Capstone for Social Entrepreneurship Course (SE400), as well as one of the three founders behind GENconnect Waterloo.

GENconnect Waterloo is a start-up social venture that provides student-oriented cooking classes, led by our team of chefs. We recruit Seniors from the local community to lead the cooking classes as volunteer chefs, teaching students to cook healthy, delicious and easy meals. The objective behind this program is to provide students and seniors with the opportunity to connect with one another through cooking a meal together. It is through collaborative experiences like this, that we develop intergenerational community connections- leading to an increased sense of community for all participants.

As a fourth-year student at Laurier, I bring personal insight and first-hand experience the process of a student learning to be self-sufficient in the kitchen.

Growing up, I had the privilege of learning to cook alongside my grandparents. This time spent in the kitchen with them gave me the opportunity to learn about them as people (outside of their role as my grandparents). I recognize that not every student at laurier has had the same opportunities, with many students traveling internationally to attend school, or having grown up without the chance to engage with their grandparents before coming here for school.

As a granddaughter, I have also witnessed both of my grandmothers lose their Husbands and observed the process of a family member learning to live on their own during the later stages of life. Although I was too young to understand the impact of death when both these events happened, the past 10 years have really put the idea of what family means into perspective for me. I have come to learn the importance of consistently putting in more patience and effort than I previously did when it comes to seeing my grandmas. I view it as a swing of the pendulum, as they used to put in a great amount of patience and effort to spend time doing activities with me. As a result, I have instilled an internal sense of value in the experience of engaging in a reciprocated friendship from someone who has grown up in another generation. It’s through spending time with my grandparents and other community members in the same demographic, that has led me to the conclusion that students and seniors face the same reality of feeling isolated or lonely when there is a lack of connection to the community.

My experience up until this point, including going through the stages of ideation, planning, launching and lastly, growing this start-up have provided me with a few key learning moments. The hardest stage for me so far has been the launch stage. I found the launch stage the most challenging for me personally because it was the big ‘make it or break it’ moment for the entire GENconnect Waterloo team. Overall it was a success, as we made a small profit, received positive feedback from both volunteers and student participants and had a positive experience with operating from within the Global Kitchen.