It’s not always easy teaching students the catering business, no matter how eager they may be. This is what Chef Paul Good discovered when he asked one of his pupils to drain the soup they were making. She promptly poured the soup down the kitchen sink.

Good is head chef for Newhouse, a treatment center for battered women and their children, and aside from preparing meals for the shelter, he runs Newhouse’s New Food culinary program. Newhouse started New Food to give women at the shelter the skills they need to enter the food-service industry and to prepare them for jobs where they can earn more than minimum wage.

Aside from a mishap here or there, the program has had its highlights, too. Good recalls the time his group participated with other caterers in a fund-raiser for the March of Dimes, and Newhouse won first place in the appetizer category with its signature crab cakes. “I didn’t even know it was a contest,” he says.

The eight-week New Food program teaches the women everything from how to estimate and order supplies, how to cook, how to serve, to how to speak to the public. Good knows his subject matter well—he has worked in hotels in Philadelphia to restaurants in Atlantic City to the former Stations Casino in Kansas City. At one time he had as many as 20 restaurants reporting to him.

He was ready for a life change when he came to Newhouse, however, and when he says he really wanted to teach, to coach, the enthusiasm in the way he says “really” leaves no doubt he’s telling the truth. Of his new students, Good told Newhouse Executive Director Leslie Caplan, “I will turn them into lean, mean, kitchen machines.”

“He’s demanding,” Caplan confirms, “but that’s what his students will have to expect in the real world.” Caplan says Newhouse started the New Food program about a year ago and has graduated between 15 and 20 women. Aside from giving women marketable skills, she would like to see New Food become a moneymaker for the shelter. The catering enterprise does everything from box lunches to six-course sit-down dinners, and from business meetings to wedding receptions.

The culinary program is just the latest step in the evolution of Newhouse, which started around 31 years ago as a Methodist-sponsored food and clothing pantry. It was about 1978, according to Caplan, that the organization transformed itself to meet the growing needs of battered women. Originally part of the church, Newhouse is now its own separate 501(c)(3) and is a United Way member agency.

Like many nonprofit organizations, Newhouse has seen a decrease in its funding sources in the past year. The 96-bed shelter is larger than any facility of its type in Kansas City, and it serves over 1,000 women and children a year. Newhouse offers not only protection for battered women, but counseling for both women and children and tutoring for the kids. For many of the women in the New Food program, they are preparing for their first jobs outside the home.

It gratifies Chef Good that not only have his students graduated and found work, some have expressed interest in starting their own businesses. His goals for 2002 are to train as many women as he can, to gain recognition for the program by winning more contests and to double New Food’s revenues. “Our funds are limited,” he says. “Why don’t we build this thing?”

Funding is not the only hurdle the program faces. With women coming to the shelter from all over the country, even from Mexico and Russia, the staff’s communication skills are often challenged. This could explain the soup incident. As a first-generation American whose family came from Pakistan, however, Good understands how to meet this challenge. He compares cooking to the international language of music where each student has to find her own rhythm. “I just tell them to do everything with love,” he says. “Then everything will turn out all right.”