— Kathleen Campbell

I'm going to give you two very fun and easy suggestions. And um, the first one is think of everybody you have met since your second grade class who you still know. And, uh, write them a little note. You can email it, but if you wanna go og a handwritten note goes a long way and tell them that you have a new endeavor where you are having cooking parties in people's homes. Would they like to host a party? And then they'll call you up and say, oh my God, yes. And you tell them what your fee is going to be. And what I usually do when I do home parties is I do not charge the hostess because I figure they're opening their home, they're letting us use their kitchen, we're storing stuff in their refrigerator, and it's just a kind and gracious thing to do. And then, um, you're going to do, uh, a price out of how much your ingredients will cost you. 'cause you're gonna bring all of the ingredients with you because you wanna make this party very easy for the hostess. And, uh, you have recipes that you have created. They're encased in plastic so you can use them over and they stay neat and clean. And, uh, I can tell you that when I first started doing this nine years ago, I charged $65 a person and the parties are two hours long. You clean up, you go, uh, they have a little party and they enjoy all of the foods that they make. Before you even plan the party. You ask the hostess what kinds of things she and her guests might like. Uh, that's one way to do it. And then the other way to do it is to market yourself to send letters to. For example, as you know, I'm a representative of the Charlie Cart. There are 500 Charlie carts throughout America. Find out where they are in your community. There are four in Philadelphia, three in Cleveland, the originals were in Berkeley, California. Write the librarian a note telling her or him that you are interested in teaching cooking classes. Give them an itinerary of what you teach, how much you will charge. Uh, do they supply the groceries, will you supply the groceries, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that, um, from my own experience, that following your passion and seeing a need in a community, um, at the risk of sounding, um, cornea, I have to turn away a lot of quote, quote business because I'm so busy. But my most favorite thing to do is to work on the Charlie Cart one. I'm not grad papers here. So, uh, there's a wonderful book, um, that is called Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. And if you look, if you type that title in on Amazon, uh, it will give you a lot of good pointers. But yes, you can make a career out of being a whole food plant-based chef. Um, we have a set of registered nurses in Southern Florida who are doing great things. Um, we have a school teacher who teaches cooking throughout Buffalo. So there are just lots and lots of opportunities, but you have to make them happen. But do it with love and make sure that you, that you just wanna be there to help other people enjoy the benefits of eating a whole food plant-based diet, which for me was life changing.