Never Miss a Chance to Do the Most Good
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Never Miss a Chance to Do the Most Good
Please enter your name, email and zip code below to sign up!
Culinary Arts Training Academy
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Watch the Culinary Arts Training Program In the News!
Watch HereNOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR Fall 2024!
Winter Class starts January 6th, 2025.
Spring Class starts March 24th, 2025.
Apply to our free Culinary Training Academy
The Salvation Army's San Francisco Culinary Arts Training Academy is a 10-week course serving the San Francisco community and students in need led by Chef Timothy Tucker. Tucker originally launched this popular program at The Salvation Army Center of Hope in Louisville, Kentucky in 2005 before bringing it to the San Francisco Salvation Army. Today, his successful formula has transformed the lives of hundreds of Boston, Miami, and Louisville-area non-traditional students who received free job skills training in the culinary arts.
The Salvation Army's Culinary Arts Training Academy teaches knife skills, food terminology, kitchen safety standards, recipes, and effective work performance. Our strong community partnerships help place graduates with top chefs in their local communities and beyond. At the program’s heart is a belief in healing lives from the inside out. That starts with fresh, healthy, mindfully prepared food.
The program provides all the culinary training needed to become employed in a restaurant or commercial kitchen, life coaching, and employment support for those who are ready to commit to a new career. Students also graduate with a ServSafe Food Handlers certificate. During and after the program, wrap-around services are available through The Way Out program to assist students with soft skills and finding housing and employment. The services are provided free of charge to our students.
While there is no cost to students to participate in the Culinary Arts Training Academy, the average cost per student to run the program is $6,000. The program succeeds because of the incredible spirit of our students and instructors and the generosity of donors who underwrite this cost.
Applicants must be 18 years of age.
About the Chef:
Timothy Tucker grew up in Springfield, Illinois and attended culinary school at Sullivan University in Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating from Sullivan, he went on to work as a line cook at two upscale restaurants in Dallas and Seattle.
The restaurant work was followed by a brief stint as a research and development chef for a frozen-food manufacturer in Louisville where he learned first-hand all about the chemicals and additives that go into processed foods. It is here that he first realized how far his passion was for cooking with healthy unprocessed foods.
After his short stay in the “culinary industrial complex,” Timothy took a job as the head chef at Fox Hollow, a natural medicine facility on an organic farm just outside of Louisville. There, he was able to gain great experience in growing; farming and cooking organically where he began to develop a culinary philosophy that would go on to govern the next ten years of his life and work as a chef.
In 2005, Timothy began a job as Executive Chef at The Salvation Army’s Center of Hope Meal Service, where he cooked over 400 meals for low-income men, women and families, each week. After learning about a kitchen skills training program at a Salvation Army Program in Los Angeles, he was inspired to create my own Culinary Training Program at the Center of Hope. He designed this 10-week course to help people get out from below the poverty level and into a culinary career.
After five years at The Salvation Army in Louisville, he was invited to develop and run a similar program at the Miami Culinary Institute at Miami-Dade College and at the Salvation Army Kroc Center in Boston, MA. Currently, he is the Director of Culinary Training at the Salvation Army San Francisco.