Rhia Patel (OC 2011-2016) is using her year out during university to live and work in Buenos Aires for Delicias de Alicia, an organisation running educational cooking workshops for underprivileged children across the capital, which is solely financed through their pop-up vegetarian restaurant and catering service. Rhia works on all aspects of the organisation, from hosting dinner events, to running the workshops and working on marketing projects for the social enterprise.

Delicias de Alicia was founded in 2015, and since then has successfully reached over 300 children through their workshops. Dinners and catering events tend to take place in a house in the centre during the week, followed by workshops every Saturday morning. The team travel out to low-income communities (often referred to as ‘villas’), where they run workshops for a set of thirty children at a time. The reality of the poor living conditions of the villas in which they live, mean that a balanced diet is essential in building the children’s immune system and protecting them from disease. These areas often don’t even have suitable sanitation systems or sufficiently insulated houses. So, by focussing their efforts here, Rhia works with Delicias de Alicia to reach the most vulnerable children in the city.

The organisation is looking to expand; firstly, by renting a better kitchen space to host more dinners, in order to finance twice the amount of workshops in 2019. Eventually, they too would like to implement the same workshops within schools in the city, in order to spread the importance of affordable nutrition for all.

If you’d like to contribute to this cause, please click here to see Rhia’s recently-launched crowdfunding page for the organisation.

Or if you’d just like to know more about the social enterprise, click here to visit the Delicias de Alicia website /en-us/home or contact Rhia directly at rhiapatel97@gmail.com.