nothin Refugees Craft A Self-Sufficiency Recipe | New Haven Independent

Refugees Craft A Self-Sufficiency Recipe

MOLLY MONTGOMERY PHOTO

Faten Natafji, Nieda Mohammed Ali Abbas, Hala Ghali at work.

Katalina’s Bakery on Whitney Avenue has closed for the night. Three women, who do not bake for Katalina’s, are hard at work in the kitchen, oiling pans, grinding nuts, laying out translucent sheets of raw phyllo dough.

Tomorrow, servers around downtown New Haven will sell the sweet results, in the form of baklava.

The three women, Nieda Mohammed Ali Abbas, Faten Natafji, and Hala Ghali, are the bakers of Havenly, a new nonprofit in New Haven that provides job training for unemployed refugee and immigrant women through kitchen-based fellowships. The fellows make baklava that Yale students deliver to both local cafés and Yale venues.

As the women earn money from the baklava sales, they receive training in financial and digital literacy, food safety certification, ESL, and job readiness.

The organization depends on collaboration between the Yale and the New Haven communities. Book Trader, the Juice Box, BYO Café, Yale School of Management Café, and late-night Yale snack bars called butteries sell the baklava. Katalina’s and G Café provide Havenly with the kitchens where the women prepare it.

Abbas.

Abbas, an Iraqi refugee, co-founded Havenly last Spring alongside Yale students Caterina Passoni, Benjamin Weiss, and Alessandro Luciano, in order to help refugee and immigrant women find long-term employment. She now serves as the head chef.

I want to help other refugees who have suffered get a job,” said Abbas. It’s so hard here in New Haven to get a job, especially if you are a refugee and don’t have the language or don’t have enough experience.”

Passoni, who now serves as the executive director of Havenly, graduated from Yale with Luciano last Spring. She volunteered for Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) and the Yale Refugee Project (YRP) while she was a student. Through this volunteering, she said, she heard over and over and over again” that refugee women are struggling to find employment, due to language barriers and, in some cases, childcare commitments and lack of prior professional experience.

Passoni said she also heard from female refugees that resettlement efforts are pretty focused on men, and disproportionately help men over women, because a lot of times it’s just assumed that the man is the head of household, so a lot of efforts go to employing the man.” Hence Havenly’s decision to provide employment for women.

Co-founders Passoni and Weiss.

Before Havenly, Abbas herself had trouble finding a job. Abbas and Passoni met in 2015, when YRP paired them together as cultural companions.” Each week, Passoni would tutor Abbas’ children, and then, she said, eat amazing meals” that Abbas prepared.

Havenly sprang out of this partnership and Abbas’ meals. Motivated by the stories they had heard about employment challenges, Passoni and fellow YRP member Luciano decided to open an employment branch of YRP in 2017. Weiss, who joined this branch last Spring and loves cooking, suggested launching a food business. The three students and Abbas began selling various treats Abbas had cooked to other Yale students in the college butteries. The baklava was a hit.

About the collaboration, Abbas said, They give me ideas, I give them ideas, together we have beautiful ideas – there’s something we can achieve.”

Over the summer, the team received a $15,000 grant from Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (CITY).

That’s when we really started thinking this could become a business,” Passoni said. That’s when we started thinking our objective is to have the greatest impact and address the issue of unemployment.”

Havenly has transitioned from the grant support to the revenue from baklava, which is currently around $4000 a month.

Passoni said that while the team hopes Havenly will eventually be a successful bakery,” they decided to create the training fellowship in order to have more impact, because we’re not just employing a limited amount of people. We have the possibility to transform the bakery into a training grounds.”

Natafji and Ghali.

The fellowship lasts four months. As of now it pays $15 an hour part-time. Natafji and Ghali, both Syrian refugees, are Havenly’s first fellows, selected through interviews. They started in January.

Moving forward, the directors are hoping to deepen the business’ relationship with the New Haven community.

The way we see Havenly operating in the future, and now honestly, is we want it to become an organization which is centered around this collaboration between Yale students and New Haven,” said Weiss. So that’s both in terms of the refugee community we’re working with directly, but beyond that, the way to participate in Havenly is largely through enjoying our food. So we’re trying our best to push beyond the Yale community.”

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