When Gillian Grace was young, their grandmother inspired a love for cooking so strong that, at just age 10, Grace single-handedly cooked an entire Thanksgiving feast. Now, after a bout of homelessness, Grace has stepped up their skills in the kitchen and hopes to embark on a new career as a personal chef.

Before last April, Grace had been homeless in San Diego for a few years, cycling between living in a car and living in a tent alongside their dog, Kaboose. That month, after a disconcerting experience involving a group of men photographing them without consent, Grace began looking for help. A couple of days later, they got a call back from the homeless outreach team at Father Joe’s Villages, San Diego’s largest homeless services provider.

In addition to housing, Father Joe’s offers services to address the complex needs of those experiencing homelessness, including health care, substance use treatment, and job training through initiatives like the culinary arts program Grace graduated from late last year.

Bringing a lifetime of culinary experience with her, Chef Helen Coyne became Father Joe’s culinary arts program instructor three and a half years ago. Coyne says that food is actually how Father Joe’s got its start. “The whole village started with Father Joe handing out peanut butter sandwiches on the street,” Coyne says. Today, “it’s a transitional shelter that gives people time to refocus, get their skills back, and go out and look for jobs.”

In Coyne’s program, she focuses on helping her students gain or regain confidence in the kitchen, starting with the basics like sanitation, food safety, and knife skills. From foundational cooking practices like setting up one’s mise en place to stock making, students move through all necessary cooking and baking techniques.

Grace had been working as a caregiver on and off for more than a decade. Naturally, that entailed cooking, but not at a professional level. Through Coyne’s program, Grace honed their skills and learned technical terms and the correct way of doing things in the kitchen—the difference between julienning and dicing, for example, and when a given cutting method is necessary. “If [a cut up vegetable] is going in a broth, it doesn’t really matter, but if it’s in a dish where someone’s going to see it, it does,” Grace explains.

Students learn more than just cooking skills, though. Whenever a Father Joe’s department requests catering for an event, it’s Coyne’s team that does it all. “We’ll make a menu, do the shopping, make the food, and sometimes deliver it across town to the home office,” she says. When students graduate from the 12-week program, they come away with all the skills they need—including professional elements like showing up on time and taking a flexible approach to the particularities of the unique, individual chefs for whom they’ll eventually work—to succeed in a culinary arts career.

“Most graduates do get professional jobs,” Coyne notes. Graduates leave the program with connections to San Diego’s culinary world, and many go on to work in hotels and restaurants around town. “One of my students wanted to open her own food truck, so the grants team pointed her in the direction of … a $25,000 grant she could apply to [in order] to make that dream come true.”

When Grace graduated, they didn’t want to return to caregiving; cycling through the inevitable deaths of their clients had become too much. But, weary of the boredom that might come from the sometimes-repetitive nature of restaurants, they were hesitant to follow that route. An interview Coyne and Grace did earlier this year with a local private chef, Neil Zevnik, led to recommendations with the private chef agencies Zevnik likes to work with. “So I’ve been looking into it,” Grace says.

Since starting just over two decades ago, each session was limited to just three students at a time. That’s because of space restrictions in the industrial kitchen Coyne’s program originally shared with those working on Father Joe’s food service needs, like serving 3,000 meals a day to residents. There was only enough room for three cutting boards among the many volunteers and staff members sharing the kitchen.

Recently, though, Father Joe’s renovated one of the homes on its scattered site campus. What was once a carpeted space with a small residential kitchen has become a culinary training lab and classroom that allows Coyne to increase each class size to eight students, increasing each year’s annual graduates from 12 to 32.

Coyne says that flexibility and adaptability are key to launching a culinary arts program for the homeless like this one. “You really just have to go with the flow,” Coyne says of making the most of the three cutting board spaces she worked with for years. “If you’re starting a culinary program where you don’t have everything set up perfectly, having a lot of flexibility and meeting the students where they are is important.”

This post was originally published on Next City.