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Urban Edibles: Job-Training Program on 4 Wheels

In the coming week, the non-profit Mission Waco will take to the streets to continue their efforts to abate poverty. But when they do it, they’ll  be going down the streets of Waco in a food trailer. KWBU’s Carlos Morales has more

Urban Edibles - that’s the official name that community members and organizers decided on for the roughly 20-foot long trailer. It’s a cool cerulean blue and it’s framed by sheet metal along its edges. When I meet Jimmy Dorrell, the executive director of Mission Waco, the trailer is getting some repairs – it just had window covers installed. For Dorrel, the food trailer is a tool that provides job training for low-income children and adults.

“So because it’s a job training program we want to expand the culinary skills of people that may have only worked at McDonalds and don’t know how to work at a real restaurant and do prepping" Dorrel says. "Our real goal is to do skills that help people move up in the wages in culinary job and end up with a living wage job.” 

Dorrell says the program will mainly work with 16 to 24-year-olds. That’s because in Waco, according to a survey released last year by the employment research hub the W.E. Upjohn Institute, that age group makes up 40 percent of the city’s unemployment. 

“People were surprised," Dorrel says of the unemployment numbers. "Because that’s when kids get their first job and you go with energy out to do, whatever you got to do to get a job, to get a skill and unfortunately that is the largest group of our folks. So what that means for me is there are kids without mentors.” 

Earlier this year, through an online funding campaign Mission Waco was able to raise about 2,500 hundred dollars –which went towards repairs and equipment updates for the trailer. In total Dorrel estimates about 18,000 dollars went into the trailer. While the food trailer won’t break even for about a year, the impact it will have on providing soft-skills job training, Dorrell believes, is immediate.

“To really be a significant organization for us, it’s the empowerment model. How do we help people get jobs, how do we help them take responsibility for their lives and their family’s lives. How do we undergird them while they go through these education processes because the poverty is entrenched.”

Urban Edibles will be up and running September 12 in the parking lot behind the World Cup café. Soon, you can catch the food trailer at church events and even at some of the Baylor Home games.