Our decision to open the Bakery Café in Dudley Square emerged from Haley House's long experience using social enterprise for community development. In 1996, after thirty years of offering meals to the homeless in Boston's South End, we understood that many of our regular guests were interested in economic empowerment.

We began teaching baking skills to these homeless men in our soup kitchen after meal hours.

At first, bakers sold their products out our front door. Our only marketing was the smell of baking bread on weekend afternoons; on many days, the line stretched out the door and down the block.

We built the program up into a full-fledged training program. We recruited trainees from re-entry and transitional housing programs throughout Boston. We hired a professional baker to guide the initiative. By grew slowly but by 2004, we were training six people a year and our graduates were moving on to jobs in The Copley Plaza Hotel, Marché, Pizzeria Regina, and the Boston Public Schools foodservice division, among many others.

The Haley House supported the training program by selling the baked goods, along with fair-trade coffee and tea, out of a storefront on Dartmouth St in the South End.

We also developed a wholesale product line, delivering our fresh baked goods to local coffee shops and restaurants.

While our development has been significant, it has been limited by the constraints of sharing kitchen space with The Haley House's other activities. In addition to the time constraints we face baking only in the off-hours of the soup kitchen, we also share freezer and refrigerator space with the soup kitchen, diminishing our capacity to store ingredients.

Within the Haley House, we've had the opportunity to develop our training program, hone our operational skills, and grow our business. After nine years of steady growth, we are ready to move the Bakery to a stand-alone facility.

For years, we have been meeting with Dudley Square residents, employees, merchants, and local organizations such as Dudley Main Streets and Dudley Pride. We have been emphatically told that our sustainable approach to food and community would be a perfect fit for the developing neighborhood. We see ourselves as partners in the revitalization of Dudley Square.