As part of API programs, students participate in Curated Experiences designed to enhance students’ cultural immersion in their host city. One of our most beloved Curated Experience type is a category called API Gives Back, which connects students with local communities through hands-on service, building empathy, cultural understanding, and meaningful impact beyond the classroom. Here is an example from Lisbon:
In Lisbon, API Gives Back centers on a single, deeply relationship-driven partnership: a weekly evening in the kitchen with AMURT, cooking alongside a team dedicated to feeding the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Cooking for Community: The AMURT Solidarity Kitchen
AMURT was founded in India in 1965 and has spent more than 40 years working across 80 countries on global development and disaster relief. Since 1985, the organization has focused on long-term development projects that find local solutions to poverty-related challenges, and in Lisbon, that work takes shape in the AMURT Solidarity Kitchen Project, which produces and distributes meals for vulnerable populations in partnership with REFOOD’s distribution network.
The experience runs about two hours, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, with space for up to seven participants at a time. Students are welcomed at the door and introduced to the AMURT team and that day’s fellow volunteers. Anne, the project’s organizer in Lisbon, shares a bit about AMURT’s work and invites students to come back anytime — the kitchen runs every Wednesday, rain or shine. From there, everyone cooks together, then packs the finished meals into boxes for distribution. The whole evening takes place at Jardins do Bombarda, a cultural and community center that hosts a range of local socio-cultural initiatives, and students get a short tour of the space once the cooking wraps up.
It’s an experience that tends to stick with students: a customized group took part this past summer, and while semester enrollment tends to be smaller, the students who try it often come back more than once.
