Week 1 Recap: Cooking Competitions, Upcoming Projects, and Welcoming our Interns!

This week was the official start to our summer workforce-development program. Made possible by a $27,000 grant from the City of Boston’s SuccessLink program, we were able to welcome nine amazing paid interns to the Fortune Avenue team.

Icebreaker: Cooking Challenge

As an icebreaker, we launched a cooking competition where interns were tasked with budgeting for groceries, creating a meal plan, cooking under a time constraint, and plating the dishes. 

Here were the rules:

Our teams of 3-4 had 10 minutes to plan a full course meal (including an entree and a desert) to feed 10 people on a $60 budget.  Then, they only had 10 minutes to go through the grocery store to get every ingredient.

The results were:

Team 1: Beef tacos (amazing) accompanied by brownies (a work in progress) 

Team 2: Chicken alfredo and chocolate-covered fruit (the effort was there; the taste though…)

So in the end Team 1 won. 

It was a fun way to break the ice and a good way to test their communication, budgeting and time management skills on day one. 

Start of Projects for New Interns

Even though we try to incorporate fun activities into our program, the very core of our mission is to teach youth about financial literacy and support them on their ideas and career paths. After learning more about individual intern interests, interns started projects that both aligned with their goals and promoted economic empowerment. 

A team of our interns started working on a community FIFA World Cup Watch Party that included free food, t-shirts, henna, and financial literacy tabling. Another group of interns began planning out a fundraising event. One of the interns interested in web development and computer science is working on rebuilding our website using Claude code. 

Campus Tours

Another part of Fortune Avenue's mission is to introduce students to higher-level education. Each week, interns attend college tours at institutions around Boston. This past week, they toured Northeastern University and learned about the co-ops, academics, and life outside of classes. Before the tour, interns learned about the college process and the three pillars of college applications: academic rigor, talent/extracurriculars, and personality/essays. We closed the college workshop off with a brainstorming session, where interns thought about how they wanted to spend the next few years of their academic careers in order to build the skills they need for college.

Even though we just started, our team is already taking off and we are excited about what we will accomplish!

Stay tuned for more updates as our interns continue to build themselves into high-agency individuals.