Our Project
From discussions with migrant support groups, the key thing preventing great cooks getting out there is the red tape around starting a food business properly. As a result, their foods are often limited to home businesses or market stalls.
The Nuance Food project is to develop and provide Food Safety training programs suitable for new migrants and refugees in order to enable talented and aspiring cooks to meet the regulations in setting up a food business.
Stage 1: The project will translate the Safe Food Handling Certificate, and Food Safety Supervisor course materials into the appropriate languages appropriate for new migrants and refugees. This material can be used by local councils and migrant groups to immediately make an impact.
Stage 2: Nuance Training will attain the necessary accreditation to start delivering the training as an approved provider. The founders will then donate their time and experience, as well as commercial kitchen time and equipment. Assistance will be obtained through a mixture of volunteers and paid staff as appropriate.
Stage 3: Translation of the Certificate Test. The current test is a multiple choice test in English. Even the idea of this can be quite daunting so the last part of our project translates this into a mixture of graphics and animations to simplify the level of English required. Much like the Learners Driving Test, we would translate certain aspects of the questions into other languages.
The impact
Our goal is to help 10,000 refugees and new migrants in 10 years. It seems like a big number, but running just 1 training class of 10 students per week already gets us to 500 students per year. With a bit of momentum and additional trainers we can double or triple that capacity.
Of course, not everyone who completes the course will start their own business, and not every business will succeed, but by helping to get the personalities and food out there we hope to start building bridges into the community.
Why are we doing this?
The benefits of multiculturalism are all around us today. The Australian society is richer, more tolerant, and more creative as a result of our history of immigration.
Australia has a quota of just 17,000 humanitarian migrants each year, many of whom have come the hard way via boat and through detention centres. Many have arrived with nothing, or very little, and many are unskilled, or have skills that are not recognised in Australia. This obviously leads to a high risk of exploitation, and also the creation of insular ghettos.
For this reason, it's vital that we welcome our newest arrivals not just to the country, but also to the community that they travelled so far to be a part of. Part of that is providing the skills to share something of the journey that they have been on, and for many, food is both the simplest and greatest expression of that journey.
By providing the required training courses catering to varying levels of English speaking ability, we aim to bridge the gap from home cooking, to something that can be shared on a larger scale with people outside of the immediate ethnic group.
Join us in building a more inclusive Australia by supporting our refugee and new migrant communities to share their culture and cuisine with the rest of our society.
Small steps towards big compassion
Think about some of the newly arrived migrant and refugee populations which have arrived in Australia. How much do you know about those countries, apart from the wars which have been on the news... eg Afghans, Sudanese, Syrians. You know they're just going to be normal human beings like all of us, but we hope that if we can train people up and into jobs and their own businesses, more of us will hear more personal stories and breed a better understanding and empathy.
The Founders of Nuance Training
Nuance Training is being setup by Theresa and Dylan Nguyen, the founders of Nuance Food, a corporate and event caterer specialising in Vietnamese cuisine operating since 2015. Coming from a Vietnamese refugee background themselves, they have been blessed by the generosity and opportunities provided to them by others and are committed to paying that forward.
Through the existing catering business, the founders have gained the experience, qualifications, connections and commercial kitchen space to make Nuance Training a success.
Corporate Sponsorships
If you own a business and would like to support the project, we have a number of tiered sponsorship levels that you can choose. We will always do our best to give thanks and highlight the people and companies that have helped to make our vision a reality. We will do this through logo placement on our website, training materials and other promotional material as appropriate.
What we need from you
To get the project up and running, we would appreciate your help in a number of ways:
1. Money donations to assist with the cost of gaining accreditation and translating the regulations into various languages.
2. Providing language skills to perform the translations.
3. Volunteer time and skills in the kitchen to assist with the teaching of classes.
4. Provide technical skills to assist development of a more friendly multiple choice assessment course.
Contact us directly if you've got skills and time to give on [email protected].