Building community among Teaching Kitchen (TK) participants is essential to identify best practices and keep participants engaged and coming back. Whether you are working with patients who need encouragement from their peers, or teens who are accustomed to sharing achievements and experiences on social media – it’s the sharing and receipt of feedback that has the power to enhance the TK experience and maintain the engagement that leads to positive outcomes. 

Yet it’s not just participants that benefit from a strong, shared community around this work. TK instructors also benefit from sharing their successes and having a forum to ask others about areas where they are challenged. Yet how do you build that without adding many more meetings or an expensive web-presence and forum manager? What are the low-lift strategies to derive the benefit of shared feedback and capture of best practices that will really move the needle of success?

Let’s dive into the top 4 strategies to achieve an effective Teaching Kitchen Community of Practice: 

1. Choose a Community Forum Platform that Fits Your Audience: Just as there are a wide range of free or low-cost digital platforms to choose from for your TK community, there are also a number of variables to consider when selecting it. Whether your participants decide upon a Facebook group, Instagram, WhatsApp or some ‘digital corkboard’ like wakelet or Padlet, choosing the right platform for your audience is key.  But what are those considerations?

For TK participants, the following are key questions to answer to lead to a good platform choice: 

• Do most participants use a computer or a phone? 
• Is there a ‘preferred’ platform for your audience? E.g. maybe your teen TK participants like TikTok, while older chronic disease patients prefer WhatsApp
• What platform will provide the most effective sense of peer support and collaboration among participants to draw participants in because they are receiving real value? 

For TK Instructors, the considerations are a bit different:

• Will your instructors appreciate a digital corkboard type set up or social media? Since they will likely often be using a computer, you have more platform options to provide a rich community experience. 
• What do you hope they will share with one another? Think through the top-level ways their cross-communication can strengthen the program and its outcomes. 
• How can this forum generate the type of Social Media (Facebook or Instagram platforms or LinkedIn) content you need on a regular basis to promote your program success stories?

2. Share Community Guidelines and Expectations: You can keep these short and concise and even borrow guidelines from other communities and modify them to suit yours. This will yield a more focused dialogue among participants that new visitors and participants will find helpful and relevant. Use the forum functions (ability to upload images and video etc., create separate info streams for different topics) to organize information you want to share. For example, one column could be from you, the program leader to share curriculum tips, videos and best practices.  This column can then be distinct and separate from the community forum column where you want to encourage your TK teachers or instructors to share innovations and support one anothers’ challenges.
3. Ask provocative questions to elicit strong reactions: As the leader you can ask people to share recipes or impressions in between classes with a specific hashtag based on what you want to know or what you find most compelling with your group to foster dialogue on sharing. Prompt your community with a question or challenge and post it an email or on the platform if they visit frequently to get your audience talking and helping one- another.
4. Monitor for Best Results: A community of practice for participants or for your instructors is a commitment. It’s unwise to embark on starting something if you cannot monitor closely to keep the environment safe, welcoming and supportive.