We're on a mission to empower everyone to be a chef at home. We believe home-cooked food is the best, for your health, friends, family and the environment too. We are trying to open a cooking school on Norfolk Island, an island paradise in the South Pacific of Australia, where food miles are close to zero and most of the produce is home grown. We want to promote a culture of cooking from scratch, using local and organic ingredients and moving the world away from convenience foods and big agriculture. This cooking school has been something we've dreamed of doing for a while. As a chef for over 16 years, I've seen the waste that goes on in the restaurant industry and want to do something better for the world, and teach everyone to cook good food for themselves. We will be using as much local produce as possible for our ingredients and encourage everyone else to do the same.

Our vision is to build a demo kitchen and workstations for both demos and hands-on cooking workshops and masterclasses. We will offer a variety of classes teaching different cuisines with up to 8-12 people per class. We will also run a casual eatery to the public, serving weekly Saturday breakfast and a monthly Street Food night, which we hope will help create a local community around us as well.

We started working on this project since May 2021 using our own funding and are now in need of extra funding to complete the school, get it up and running and open officially in January 2022. We are so close to getting it there so we are asking the community to help us out.

The pledges we have listed are pre-pay experiences in the form of gift cards or virtual cooking classes, so there are options if you want to support us but can't make it to Norfolk Island. But if you are interested in visiting our beautiful island, we are just a short 2.5 hour flight from Sydney or Brisbane. Our borders are open with no restrictions at the moment.

We're trying to keep our budget as lean as possible with marketing and web design, interior painting and so much more done by ourselves. We even cut and milled our own trees to use for our cabinets and tabletops, and handcut our own wood letter blocks for signage.

The major costs are the following:

• 6 months rent: $8000
• Demo counter, tables and cabinets made by local craftmen and timber: $9000
• Kitchen equipment, materials and supplies: $12000
• Renovation and fit out costs: $6000
• Marketing flyers $1000

Total initial investment: $36,000

Our own funding spent already: $28,000

Remaining funding needed for completion and launch: $8,000

Thanks so much for reading about our project. We are super grateful for everyone local, far and wide who can support us on this sustainable business mission to make the world greener and healthier!