Placement: Six-week Leadership in Action project at De Sering, a community kitchen in Amsterdam.
Area of Focus: The intersection of nourishing food, environmental sustainability, and community building.
Project Goals:
1) To create connections between De Sering and Taste Before You Waste, two organisations tackling food waste and accessible community nutrition in Amsterdam.
2) To support De Sering in improving organisational functioning beyond the small founding team to support future growth goals.
Outcomes for De Sering:
- I designed a Notion-based operations guide to formalise workflows and support future onboarding. I interviewed each team member about their role and practically how they fulfill each of their tasks and responsibilities, which I wrote up as an instruction manual.
- I reorganised De Sering’s Google Drive to improve accessibility for team members and knowledge retention with staff turnover. Previously, their files had been stored between the founder’s personal Drive and the organisation's, which made them hard to find and access. There were also many duplicates and unnamed files. I moved all the files into the shared drives, then organised them into appropriate categories and subfolders, and finally set each of them up to be accessible by the correct team members. Their Google Drive is now clearly set up with a guide for all future filing practices. This is important as they move into their next phase of expansion in the coming year.
- To strengthen collaboration between De Sering and Taste Before You Waste, I facilitate a joint food rescue and processing initiative, launching later this month. The programme brings surplus produce from Taste Before You Waste’s existing suppliers to De Sering’s kitchen (where they have facilities with more capacity), where it is transformed into sauces and ferments which will be served at both community kitchens. This new project is supported by the Slow Food Network. The initiative will be co-run by volunteers from both organisations.
- I also co-taught a community cooking class for children with Taste Before You Waste, promoting nutrition education and awareness of food waste.
Leadership Impact: I developed skills in systems thinking, organisational management, and cross-cultural collaboration, while contributing to the long-term sustainability of a community-driven initiative. I learned a lot from the experience, notably, I gained an understanding of just how much it takes behind the scenes to run an organisation like this one.