A group of disadvantaged young people from across Sydney have successfully completed a hospitality course aimed at getting them employment.

Food rescue charity OzHarvest runs Nourish, a six-month program where participants learn different aspects of the hospitality industry, including cooking and serving customers.

Nourish student 26-year-old Mozelle Moses came to the course after struggling with homelessness for four years.

“I’ve had supported accommodation [during] that time, I’ve been in rehabilitation and halfway houses,” she explained.

Ms Moses said her life started to become unmanageable following the death of her partner of seven years to leukaemia in 2011.

“After that things spiralled out of control,” she said.

Ms Moses said she started using heroin regularly following her partner’s death.

She said the Nourish course has brought positivity to her life and allowed her to change and grow.

“I never thought I’d be putting a chef’s uniform on and I’ve learnt so much from it,” Ms Moses said.

“It’s fun — when you look at what you’ve made — because I don’t really cook for myself at home and never really have.

I’d like to be the cliched friendly butcher down the road that everyone knows, that’s what I want to be.
Alex Flavill
“This has definitely boosted my confidence and opened a new world for me.”

Some of the skills Ms Moses learnt on the course include menu planning, preparing vegetables and making pastry.

Nourish program manager Belinda Woollett said students also learn about working in the hospitality environment.

“The first part of the course involves basic skills around working as a team, communication and simple cooking,” she said.

“When a student starts with us they tend to not be that confident, they don’t have much self-esteem and they don’t really know anything about the hospitality industry.”

The students then go through a certificate II TAFE course in hospitality where they learn skills like serving customers and making coffee.

“It’s quite advanced for a certificate II, but they’re very engaging young people so we try to keep the skills up to them as they learn,” Ms Woollett said.

One of the students, 17-year-old Alex Flavill, lost his parents in a car accident when he was just four years old.

“Me and my older brother Isaac, we survived,” he recalled.

“I managed to walk away with two broken legs [and] my brother shattered his pelvis, his back and his arm,”

Alex and his brother were raised by his aunty and admitted that he and his brother could be a handful.

But he said the Nourish course taught him about responsibility and has “changed” him.

“I’m becoming a better person than what I used to be, especially now that I have an outlet and something to put my passion into,” he said.

Alex said learning how to make roast chicken, his favourite dish during the Nourish course, was the “best” though it took him a bit of time to get used to handling poultry.

“The first time I had to stick my hand inside a chicken, that was eventful,” he said.

“It seemed a bit wrong but then I started to get used to it.”

Alex now enjoys working with meat so much that he hopes to start a butchery apprenticeship.

“Butchering I think would be a nice, slow-paced, relaxing kind of job,” he said.

“I’d like to be the cliched friendly butcher down the road that everyone knows, that’s what I want to be.”

Following through with real jobs

OzHarvest hopes to now match up some of the students with businesses donating food to the charity.

“Our intention is for employment, so if they’re a young mum with two kids there’s no point in trying to force them into full-time work,” Ms Woollett said.

“So we try to find them work that’s in their area that really suits with the needs of their lifestyle.”