Education to empower girls and women

Cohorts Two and Three have successfully finalized their virtual journey and have succeeded at launching, propelling and-or renovating their food businesses. Twenty percent of Cohorts Two and Three fellows, have continued their education through our newly launched Advanced Intensive Virtual Course on Food Design and Social Media for Food Ventures. Through this new course, Cocinando Sueños women, have learned how to ideate, conceptualize and visually portray the renovated concepts of their small food businesses using tools such as Mood Boards. Women have highly benefited from learning while doing, guided by their professor and coach a cook and food designer, who has been working with them on how to incorporate food design into their ventures, and ultimately their food products.

Cohort Four women have reached the last stage of their journey

with retention and attendance rates of 95%. Professors, mentors and coaches have witnessed students have been incorporating their recent acquired skills to enhance their products, increase sales and ultimately their profit. During this last stage, in the process, we have witnessed fellows have particularly benefited from learning how to use packaging such that it best reveals the newly renovated food ventures concept. Professors and mentors have also seen significant improvements in fellows´ social media accounts activity, as well as with their marketing strategies in general. Students have mentioned prior to taking the digital marketing and social media class within this course, their brands were not active on social media, they barely used their whatsapp statuses. They learned not only how to best use both their venture and their personal social media accounts to best market their brand and their products, resulting in increasing their followers and higher sales.

Currently students and alums are working with their professors, coaches and mentors on further enhancing and innovating within their food products and preparing their applications for our new to be launched permanent commercialization channel for Cocinando Sueños women´s products.

Cohorts two and three have reached the final stage of their virtual journey, with retention and attendance rates of 90%. Professors, mentors and coaches have witnessed significant improvements in the fellows products and ventures. Our community of professors, coaches and mentors have reported the program to allow them to grow and learn from the fellows.

Guided by our newest courses in Innovation, Leadership and Strategies for Renovation through the power of collaboration fellows have succeed at finding niche markets and opportunities, as well as identified customers’ needs and market trends, creating new products, business lines and renovating their businesses.

Some women have reported an increase in their sales in the midst of the Covid generated crisis through their newly renovated products and-or ventures. Others have reported to be facing extremely challenging times in terms of sales due to the Covid crisis, struggling to provide for themselves and their families. We have launched a task force together with Kalpata experts in design thinking and renovation, as well as students, to develop and carry out innovative strategies to boost fellows’ sales by building on current market trends and opportunities.

We have managed to launch a new cohort where alums and about to graduate women who have exceled in the program, developing and sustaining their small culinary and pastry businesses are the course facilitators. This has not only empowered them but proved to be an inspiring model to grow our impact as we build a community of social change agents through the power of the food industry. 

Through a series of cocreation and impact evaluation exercises, we have been able to gain significant insights on the contents and methodology of our courses and most importantly the needed skills and how to best deliver them to our students. We have started and are currently in the process of making the needed adjustments and improvements in terms of our curriculum, methodology and the classes topics and skills, geared towards best equipping women with the needed skillset to launch, propel and grow their own culinary ventures.

As a graduation project, together with our fellows, we have launched our first Holiday Virtual Catalogue with a variety of signature treats from our fellows, reaching a total of $7.500 in sales. This initiative enabled women to further develop their innovative products and brands. Entrepreneurs also learned work on how to make an efficient use of their resources increasing their profit. Women also further learned about customer preferences and adjusted their products to best tailor their needs and market trends.

Paulina Toro

Project Leader