Turlock teacher, grads head to New York to be featured on ‘The Kelly Clarkson Show’
Singer and talk-show host Kelly Clarkson will welcome a trio of Turlockers to her program this week.
Pitman High School culinary arts instructor Mohini Singh and two students who founded the service club Kitchens for Change flew to New York City to film a segment on the NBC show hosted by the Grammy Award winner and original American Idol. It is scheduled to air Wednesday, Nov. 1, at 3 p.m. on Sacramento’s KCRA Channel 3.
The students are Turlock Unified grads Audrey Smallwood, now a freshman at Boston College, and Elias Rabine, Singh’s son, who attends UC Berkeley, said Turlock Unified spokeswoman Marie Russell. As part of being featured on Clarkson’s show, Kitchens for Change was awarded $10,000 from Con-Agra to alleviate hunger in the community.
Founded two years ago, Kitchens for Change is a student-run organization at Turlock and Pitman high schools. The club helps address issues of food insecurity and does service in the city.
In a November 2021 story in The Bee, Rabine said he was inspired by celebrity chef José Andrés, founder of the World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that provides professional culinary training to individuals who in turn use those skills to produce meals in the wake of natural disasters. Andres ended up surprising him, his mother and Smallwood on Clarkson’s show.
In Stanislaus County, around 60,700 people were considered food insecure in 2021, meaning they don’t know when their next meal will be.
In November 2021, Kitchen for Change teamed up with the International Rescue Committee and sold over 150 food tickets for family-size pasta and salad meals for Afghan refugees.
Other fundraising events had students sell restaurant meal tickets, with the profits going to address food insecurity. At the restaurants for which they sold the tickets, the students were paired with chefs to cook for the evening.
Kitchens for Change also received a $10,000 grant last year from the Lead4Change Student Leadership Program, one of the largest privately funded student leadership programs in the country.
