Nic Honors Chef For Humanitarian Work Program Puts Troubled Kids To Work In Resort Bakery

Jim Barrett is changing lives - one strawberry tart at a time.

As executive pastry chef for The Coeur d’Alene Resort, Barrett oversees the creation of several thousand baked goods a day in a kitchen that uses 30,000 pounds of chocolate a year.

But his most recent award is not for his orange rolls or his tiramisu.

It’s for a program he created while taking classes at North Idaho College that puts troubled teenagers from the North Idaho Behavioral Health Institute into chefs’ uniforms and into the resort kitchen.

“It gives them a real-life experience,” Barrett said. “They’re learning what it’s like to hold a job.”

North Idaho College has named Barrett the Service Learning Student of the Year and nominated him for a national humanitarian award.

He expects to hear this month whether he is one of eight students from 500 colleges around the country to win the Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award, which donates $1,500 to the winner’s program.

Barrett, 34, began the project in January 1997 as a student in Laurie Olson-Horswill’s English class at NIC. Instead of a traditional composition course, students were expected to volunteer in the community and write journal entries and research papers about it.

“It started with my class and he really took it far beyond that,” Olson-Horswill said. “He’s just the epitome of what this program is all about.”

Service-learning programs became popular at the nation’s colleges and universities in the early 1990s as a way of connecting students with the community.

NIC began its program last year, and now is part of a service-learning partnership with 600 other colleges, said Olson-Horswill, who is the school’s service-learning coordinator.

About 275 NIC students have participated in the program since it began, volunteering at women’s shelters, group homes, AIDS organizations and nursing homes, she said.

“They really do end up coming out of this with a new understanding of how large their community is and how much one person can do,” she said.

That’s just what Barrett has discovered. The resort has hired 18 of the teens in the program to work in the bakery and convention center kitchen, along with housekeeping, service staff and audio-visual departments.

He admits that many of them did not work out, but said the program still is a success.

“It’s just been really rewarding to think I’ve had some kind of influence on the lives of these kids,” he said.