- Finally, today, I look inside the Detroit Food Academy.

The nonprofit organization teaches culinary and entrepreneurial skills to teens and young adults.

BridgeDetroit reporter, Micah Walker, sat down with two of the instructors to learn more about how the academy uses the art of cooking to inspire young Detroiters to become community leaders.

- The Detroit Food Academy is a nonprofit that works to inspire youth, young Detroiters from the age of 10 to 24 through culinary arts and food entrepreneurship from cooking delicious healthy meals for friends and family to facilitating complex community conversations.

And our mission is to make sure that we build holistic leaders that are connected, they're healthy, and they're giving back to the community.

- And what made the two of you interested in joining the organization?

- I actually was approached by a friend who was a part of Detroit Food Academy already, and they told me that they can use more men inside the organization.

And I had the capacity at the time.

I had went to culinary school.

I wanted to find ways to kind of be more engaged in my community through culinary in particular.

And Detroit Food Academy kind of fit like a lot of the little things that I wanted to do with myself moving forward.

- And in 2020, I was furloughed from being at the restaurant.

And so I kind of didn't know what it is that I wanted to do.

Had did some meal prep for my own business during that summer, and in October of 2020, had the opportunity to come on board although we did have a common friend that had been working here already.

- What's cool about our particular curriculum is it's very much set up like an actual culinary school.

So we kind of start with the basics, then we go into different segments, so whether it be different proteins, fish, chicken, beef, we go through breads, we go through veggies.

So, each month we kind of focus in on a different part of culinary, and the students have the opportunity to create dishes based off of what we're studying at that point in time.

- Some of the items that the youth said that they really, really loved was making tortillas from scratch.

They always wanted us to do french fries.

Once they knew like how easy it was to make french fries, they're like, "We're never buying frozen potatoes again.

I'm going to make my own French fries.

We started with a theme and the youth threw out tons of but then came down to being like, We actually want it to be let's look into Detroit food and what you about what Detroit food means.

And so from there we started to have the Detroit anime themed - Yeah, the Coney bao bun was probably the most popular thing that I would say throughout the entire year, which was a bao bun that we cut in half and made into basically a Coney dog, and we topped it with some collard kimchi.

That was by far the students' favorite dish.

- [Micah] I know you guys run the Advanced Leadership Program.

What does that entail?

- Months and months of planning.

But our Advanced Leadership Program is actually where our youth who've been in the program for two years, they have the opportunity to come to the advanced side where we do more life skill focus based learning, as well as deep culinary skills.

- So these students have the opportunity to kind of further their culinary skills.

They've been with DFA for a while.

They've learned a lot of the basics, a lot of the knife skills, a lot of the culinary terms.

And at that point, we give them the opportunity to bring it all together.

And I actually do dishes more regularly.

So we cook once a week as opposed to once a month.

- As the program is running, probably about six months, we kind of give them the lead where they start cooking the meals themselves, and we kind of take a step back.

The youth for the advanced, they get the opportunity to do a a capstone project, but this year, thanks to Mr. Booze, we actually were able to develop a relationship with Frame.

- What is Frame?

- Frame is a- - Pop-up rotating restaurant establishment based outta Hazel Park.

They bring in different restaurants every month, and they also have pop-ups on weekend.

And they allow for people to kind of like basically do stages or monthly basis where they get to come in, excuse me, and operate their business out of Frame.

So it culminates in us having a five course dinner at Frame.

It's put on by the students.

So essentially the students come up with a menu, they came up with a theme, you know, we come up with the dishes, the actual ingredients.

We scale up the recipes to make 'em fit, feeding 50 people.

- There were a lot of different elements that we added in there too.

They created their own cookbook based on the recipes that they had developed for the Frame dinner, as well as one of our past events.

It was really much a lot of fun, and especially as we were curating the menu, we tested each dish.

-Its Beautiful -And so to have the youth go from, "I'm not for sure if I actually want to make that" to being like, "This is so good, "I can't wait to show my mom and tell my friends about it," it was like just to see that that level of engagement, that level of excitement just takes your heartstrings in a whole nother direction.

- So do many of the kids wanna go into culinary arts after taking the program?

- Out of our 20 youth, only four of them want to pursue culinary arts.

The other ones are just make making sure that they have those life skills.

- And we have one student who wants to become a master chef, right?

She wants to be the first black female master chef.

And to know that DFA and our advanced class provides a space for her to kind of develop those skills early, so before she goes out and gets a job or goes into culinary school, she kinda already has this foundation laid for her.

- So Jermond and Vee, what's the highlight of working at Detroit Food Academy?

- How Booze and I approach it is, what didn't we have as youth that we can use to infiltrate our youth to make sure that they have that and be well-rounded.

And so the highlight is being able to see them develop, being able to see them being powerful, being able to see them using their voices.

- Planting seeds for the future with them, knowing that you are investing in them in a way that will help develop them to be their best person down the line.

And then also watching them in community, watching them develop relationships, and watching them blossom.