Arc Culinary needs your help and your support! It is the key ingredient in making our dreams come true!

One of Arc Broward’s key initiatives to meet the educational and career challenges faced by people with disabilities and life challenges is Arc Culinary.  A social enterprise initiated in 2008, Arc Culinary offers a post-secondary certificate program in ‘Entry Level Culinary Arts’ combined with real world work experience in Arc Culinary’s successful catering business.  The combination of those important ingredients plus the program’s intensive career and financial literacy support, have produced remarkable outcomes for individuals served as well as the ever growing local food and hospitality business community that is always hungry for trained, skilled and loyal employees. The success of Arc Culinary will help us achieve another long-term goal of being increasingly financially independent as an organization and help better serve one in five Broward County residents with disabilities. 

The Project includes the build-out and equipping of approximately 8,000 square feet on the Arc Broward Regional campus in the City of Sunrise, and related improvements. The organization owns the building and an adjacent one acre parcel that will be used for additional parking. The Project will include teaching kitchen areas, classrooms, lecture/demo room, cooking and preparation areas, storage, refrigeration and related commercial kitchen equipment, technology and other furnishings and equipment.

How you can help

Thanks to support received by the Mary N. Porter Legacy Fund for Capital Projects at the Community Foundation of Broward County, individual and corporate donations to the Arc Culinary Project will be matched! Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of a project that will impact this community for years to come. 

For more information or to discuss naming rights associated with the new facility, please contact Kim Vassar, Vice President of Philanthropy kvassar@arcbroward.com or (954) 746-9400 ext. 2209. 

Individuals and corporations with gifts of $500 or more will be recognized on our Donor Wall, a permanent structure in the new Arc Culinary space which will highlight those supporters who made this dream a reality. 

Mary Porter was a philanthropist and humanitarian who lived in Broward.  She believed that giving back is a part of who we are as a people.  Mary’s giving spanned the range of all issues in Broward including the arts, animal welfare, health and human services and more.  She enjoyed investing in community solutions and was excited to be a part of a community of active givers. One of three Funds created in the fall of 2012 from her estate, the Mary N. Porter Legacy Fund at the Community Foundation of Broward is designed to support capital projects including new construction, renovations and other major capital initiatives to improve the quality of services in Broward.  This is the first Fund of this kind in Broward, specifically addressing the capital needs of our community.