Cooking For A Cause -By Pragya Shekhawat

Vibha Bay Area hosted its very first virtual cooking class on May 30th to help raise funds for Vibha’s Ray of Hope campaign. To organize this event, Vibha volunteers reached out to Hetal Vasavada (of Master 6 Season 6 fame and @milkandcardamom) and Amisha Gurbani (of @TheJamLab and a previous Vibha volunteer herself) – both Hetal and Amisha responded promptly and were happy to help. Through leveraging their following, Vibha’s marketing team efforts and a lot of word of mouth marketing, this workshop was able to register a total of 63 people for a total of $936 raised. This class started with Amisha saying a few words about why she chose to work with Vibha and what its mission means to her, followed by her demonstrating how to make her paneer sweet potato tacos and a Q&A at the end (as well as any questions about the cooking process during the event). Then, it was Hetal’s turn to share how Vibha’s mission resonates with her and demonstrate how to make her rose cardamom snickerdoodle cookies.

According to the event leads, it was definitely a lot of work planning for this event and figuring out the marketing strategy for the event as well as virtual logistics like hosting options on Zoom, etc, but it was still significantly easier than planning a physical event as they didn’t have to worry about finding and reserving a venue, etc. Planning the actual content of the session was also very fast and easy since Hetal and Amisha are both popular food bloggers who’ve had experience doing cooking demos/classes on Instagram lives.

Overall, this was a successful workshop and Vibha Bay Area hopes to do similar events like this in the future.