The Cookie Squad
In our first few months of opening we piloted our first 5-week Cookie Project, working with a truly phenomenal group of Year 11 students from Gosden House School.
Each week, alongside baking lots of cookies, the Cookie Squad developed a range of skills essential to working in a coffee shop including customer service, food hygiene and preparation, teamwork, barista skills, and advertising.
On our penultimate week, the Forge on the Green volunteers and staff joined us as customers in the coffee shop to provide the Cookie Squad with a ‘real life’ service experience. The students were both excited and understandably nervous before we opened the doors to the customers. They were all brilliant and exceptionally professional and it was truly wonderful to see their confidence and self-belief grow.
Our final session was an opportunity for the students to show all they’d learned to their invited family and friends, school staff, their headteacher and chair of governors. They greeted their guests and ran the show. It was afternoon filled with total joy, magical memories and lots of emotional moments. The Cookie Squad had not only exceeded our expectations in every session they attended but their families and school staff were equally incredibly impressed with their skills and confidence in the workplace environment.
During the 5-week project the profits from every cookie sold went towards funding the Cookie Squad’s chosen positive impact project of upcycling their Year 10 and 11 common room. They had wanted to create a vibrant, comfortable space where future students would be happy to ‘be’, a place filled with fun activities for students to engage with together or individually.
By the end of the 5 weeks, they had smashed their original target and raised £400 through cookie sales and donations.