In the kitchen
Culinary Program & Food Truck
Life Skills 4: a commercial kitchen on site and a working food truck, with paid vocational training and certifications. Being built for 2026.
Chapter 01
Life Skills 4, and where things stand
A plain statement first. The Culinary Program & Food Truck at ProjectFREE is planned for 2026 and is not yet operating. ProjectFREE says it is working hard to make it happen in 2026. The kitchen and the truck do not exist yet as a service you can sign up for. What exists today is a plan, a record in the arts that goes back to 2009 and a stated goal, laid out here so families know exactly where things stand.
The program belongs to Life Skills 4. In 2023 Florida's Agency for Persons with Disabilities, known as APD, rolled out Life Skills 4, a service aimed at employment and training. The culinary program and food truck are ProjectFREE's plan for it, based at 2026 51st Street South in Gulfport. The group calls it the first food truck integrated and culinary program for adults with diverse abilities, and its tagline says the rest: get paid to train.
A stainless steel prep table with chopped peppers, onion and herbs on a cutting board beside steel bowls
The plan: a kitchen, a truck and paid training
Three pieces make up the plan. First, a commercial food kitchen on site at ProjectFREE. Second, a fully operational food truck. Third, vocational training that comes with pay and with certifications. The kitchen is where members would learn the trade. The truck is where that training meets the public. Certifications are what make the training count outside ProjectFREE too.
Food work teaches a lot in a small space: reading an order, working a station, keeping a surface clean, and standing beside other people when it gets busy. Those are facts about any working kitchen, and they are why a kitchen makes a good place to train. ProjectFREE has not published a menu, a schedule, a parking spot for the truck, a training length or the names of the certifications, so none of those appear here.
Chapter 03
Paid to train, and how to help
The money question sits at the center. ProjectFREE points out that adults with disabilities have been paid far below minimum wage, legally, for more than 35 years. The culinary program aims at sustainable income for its members: training that pays, in a trade with real certifications. That is a larger ambition than a day program usually carries, and ProjectFREE states it openly.
Building a commercial kitchen and equipping a food truck costs money, and ProjectFREE is raising it. There is a GoFundMe called Fuel ProjectFREE's Food Truck Initiative, and the donate page on this site takes gifts through PayPal. Questions about the plan go to (727) 603-0595. ProjectFREE has not published a sign-up process for the program yet, so call and ask Kim Costanzo's team how interest is being tracked.
Planned for 2026 and not yet operating. ProjectFREE is working to open the kitchen and the food truck in 2026.