Following the completion of kitchen and service training by Shangri-La Hotel, our youth interns were given the opportunity to hone their soft skills and hard skills for three weeks during the DIY4YCAFE’s prototype launch.
During the launch, the interns were not only required to practice what they have learnt in a week, but also work together as a team to maintain the cafe’s operations. As their mentors, we played a supporting role in terms of helping them to develop their soft skills and character values and providing them with guidance when they are in doubt.
During the first week of the cafe’s launch, there were many struggles faced by our interns such as unfamiliarity with the menu and handling multiple orders.
Hence, in order to shorten the time taken for a service crew to take down a customer’s order and pass it on to the kitchen crew to prepare, we improvised by coming up with an order chart against the wall. Utilising the previous acronym created, the order chart helps to ensure our interns are on the same page during operations. This also help to reduce communication breakdown due to wrong orders taken or prepared.
At the same time, in order to keep our mentees’ emotions in check, each of us took on different roles to oversee different aspects of the cafe - kitchen, service and DIY corner.
Following the second week of operations, DIY4YCAFE was involved in providing drinks and snacks for a Christmas Festival outside REACH Youth Powerhouse on 16 December 2017. During the festival, our youth interns served up to 100 pax that day. Through the festival, we witnessed the potential of how DIY4YCAFE can also cater to the masses with DIY corner garnering the most interest from the public.
However, over the past two weeks of operations, we also realised that there was a lack of publicity in terms of reaching out to existing REACH youths which the cafe aim to reach at start. In order to gather crowd, free samples and flyers were distributed around the vicinity of REACH Youth Powerhouse during operating days. From this experience, we realised the there was a need to liaise more effectively with other staffs at REACH in charge of different groups of youth at risks such as utilising their existing WhatsApp groups to reach out to their targeted youths instead of random marketing efforts.
On hindsight, even though all the target audience attracted was not entirely from REACH, the increase in crowd numbers created a platform for our interns to practice their soft and hard skills.
At the end of our last week of operations, our interns were satisfied in terms of their personal growth and were more certain of the job careers they would like to undertake in the near future.
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