Second Helpings’ Director of Hunger Relief, Chef Liz Giménez will showcase her Venezuelan heritage alongside 15 other foreign-born, Indy chefs at a new event called Welcoming Table at Ivy Tech Community College between 1-5pm on Sunday, September 25, 2016.
Born in the Andes and raised near the Caribbean coast, Chef Liz had her first stateside experience during a year-long high school exchange program. After developing a relationship with her host sister, Giménez was encouraged to apply for a scholarship with Southern Oregon University, which she secured along with admission to the university. While earning her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Giménez developed a passion for the culinary arts while assisting the pastry chef in the university cafeteria, where they made desserts for 3,500 students and faculty members in a large, industrial kitchen.
Giménez secured her U.S. citizenship shortly after graduating college. After graduation, she went to work in several marketing and communications roles in relationship to the Hispanic population in Oregon. She found herself in several similar positions, before moving across the country to Indiana with her husband in 2004. With few job prospects, and limited work for Spanish language marketing and communications, Giménez found herself returning to her passion for food through the Culinary Job Training program at Second Helpings.
Near the end of her 10-week course, Giménez was paired to work an event with renowned local chef Greg Hardesty, who was running his restaurant Elements – currently executive chef and owner at Recess. The two worked well together at the event, which led to a job offer for Gimenez to run Hardesty’s pastry department while his pastry chef took her maternity leave. After seven months of industry experience, Giménez returned to Second Helpings as an employee in the role of Kitchen Assistant. She was later promoted to Director of Hunger Relief, a role she has maintained for more than a decade.
“It’s getting a lot of food that would’ve been put in the landfill and putting it to good use to feed hungry kids and the elderly,” Giménez says. “Feeding them enables them to have a better quality of life, go to school, hopefully break the cycle of poverty, and exposes them to new foods that they may not otherwise encounter. That was really attractive, and it’s still what keeps me here – knowing that what we do together makes a difference in somebody’s life.”
As Director of Hunger Relief, Chef Liz is responsible for planning the menus for the agencies that Second Helpings serves. She oversees a volunteer kitchen that prepares 4,000 nutritious, eye-appealing meals for service agencies across Indianapolis each day.
In January 2016, Chef Liz accepted an adjunct professor position with Ivy Tech Community College, where she teaches safe food handling in addition to her duties at Second Helpings. “I enjoy it tremendously, because at the college level there are lots of young people eager to learn,” Giménez says. “I’m also making a positive impact in their lives by giving them the information that I have acquired through all these years. The whole point is to give them the opportunity to do it better than I ever did: to be better, to have more choices. It’s really exciting for me, because they push me to be better. It pushes me to do more research, read, find videos and supporting material that I can share with my students so that they have the best material to facilitate their learning in a much more effective way.”
Tickets to Welcoming Table are $15 in advance, and $20 at the door. In addition to food and drinks, guests will enjoy music selections from DJ Kyle Long.