Meet our first scholarship recipient!
The Ottawa Community Housing (OCH) Foundation is pleased to present Amanda Demers with the $7,500 OCH culinary scholarship. The coveted scholarship will help Demers fund her way through Algonquin College’s two year Culinary Management program beginning this fall.
“Amanda is the first recipient of our Algonquin College scholarship and she is truly a perfect fit,” says Howard Whittaker, the OCH Foundation’s Executive Director. “Her desire to give back to her community while striving for her own personal progress is right in the spirit of the OCH Foundation.”
“I can’t even begin to explain how thrilled I am about this opportunity,” explains Demers. “It’s a dream that I have been gradually pursuing. This scholarship has moved up the timeline and connected me with resources and supports to meet several accomplishments and build networks and skills along the way.”
Amanda, a single mother of two, lives in OCH’s Morrison Gardens community. After completing her schooling in the culinary arts, Demers hopes to add her own personal touch to the city’s food truck community of entrepreneurs by owning and operating a truck of her own. It would be a family-run business, she says. Demers wants to include her son and daughter in building the enterprise to, “give them a chance to broaden their horizons.”
The culinary scholarship is funded through proceeds gathered at the Ottawa Food Truck Rally, an annual event organized by the OCH Foundation. The Rally is not just about the food and flavours served up by the best of our city’s mobile culinary experts. The gastronomic phenomenon is also about community strength and healthy neighbourhoods, the very philosophy behind the OCH Foundation.
Through innovative opportunities found and partnerships made in key areas of education, employment and leadership, the OCH Foundation helps the 32,000 residents living in Ottawa Community Housing break the cycle of poverty. Ottawa Community Housing is the second largest social housing provider in Ontario.
“We have many success stories to tell,” says Whittaker of the Foundation. “Amanda Demers is one of them – she is an Ottawa resident who is one to watch.”
Come join us at the third annual Ottawa Food Truck Rally on Saturday, September 26th, 2015 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at 135 Barrette Street. Proceeds from this year will fund the scholarship’s next recipient.