Havenly Honors Refugee Employers

Local bakers, daycare leaders, and healthcare providers came together to celebrate the success of a downtown cafe’s efforts to get New Haven employers to hire refugee and immigrant women.

Thirty employers, employees, and community leaders attended that event on Tuesday evening at Havenly, a community café that provides refugee women with a source of income and learning resources. The focus of the gathering was to recognize and promote refugee employment initiatives made possible through Havenly’s partnerships with organizations across New Haven.

The lights dimmed and Arabic songs simmered into instrumental music as guests filed into the 25 Temple St. restaurant, where they were greeted by an array of Middle Eastern food including Maqluba, or ​“upside-down” rice, meat, and vegetables, as well as salad, hummus, tzatziki sauce, grape leaves, and baklava, a layered pastry delicacy.

Havenly Co-Directors Jane Dowd, Nieda Abbas, and Camila Güiza-Chavez opened the event, thanking the representatives of Havenly’s partners for coming. 

“We tried to make this a nice event, but we’re always a bit informal and family-style at Havenly. Feel free to make this your home,” Güiza-Chavez said.

Abbas then told the story of how Havenly came to be, speaking with passion and excitement in Arabic as she invited a friend to translate for the audience. 

Founded in 2018 through a collaboration between then-Yale undergraduate Caterina Passoni and Abbas, a refugee who had left behind her career as entrepreneur and owner of three restaurants in Baghdad, Havenly has served thousands of Middle Eastern delicacies and meals while simultaneously empowering New Haven’s community of refugee women through educational programs and hiring initiatives.

Formerly operated out of borrowed kitchen space at New Haven’s Jewish Community Center, Havenly opened its flagship café at 25 Temple St. two years after its founding and seeks to open another location in Connecticut.

“We suffered a lot,” Abbas’ friend translated, ​“but I am going to keep it positive for you all here tonight. Now, we are in this beautiful space, and I could not be more grateful.”

The Havenly Fellowship, established in 2018, is a six-month training program that aims to equip refugee women with work experience and the skills needed to support themselves and their communities. The fellowship’s programming includes several hours a week of working in the Havenly café and classes in English, career readiness, financial and digital literacy, and food safety, followed by employment placements after their graduation.

The fellowship also pays $16.50 an hour to ensure that participants can prioritize their education rather than having no choice but to consider it second to a minimum wage career. Currently, the minimum wage in Connecticut is $15 an hour.

More recently, Havenly launched a program intended to open doors for refugee women who may already possess vocational and/or academic experience that they are ready to apply. Rather than engage in a six-month track, the program offers eight weeks of classes followed by placement at a twelve-week paid internship at organizations across New Haven.

Language emerged as the theme of the night, both as Havenly Fellowship alumni translated English into Arabic for one another and as each employer emphasized the value of having multiple languages represented at their offices after Güiza-Chavez individually thanked them and presented them with a commemorative Havenly desk ornament.

Havenly’s employer partners who were honored on Tuesday night included Clifford Beers Community Health Center, Phyllis Bodel Daycare Center, early education advocate Cercle, New Haven Public Schools, Marjolaine Pastry Shop, Yale New Haven Health, and Sodexo, the University of New Haven’s dining services.

Arlene Beltran Cardenas, owner of Marjolaine Pastry Shop, shared her experience with employing her first Havenly intern, a soon-to-be graduate of the new 16-week program. ​“Usually, I just don’t click with interns, but we hit it off immediately. When she first arrived, I had no one helping me in the kitchens, but now, it’s just me and her every morning. She truly makes my life easier,” she said.

“We love you,” Cardenas teased as she sat down with her intern, who teared up hearing about the impact she has had on the baker — one that may have landed her a full-time position, Cardenas mentioned.

Kyle Miller, the current director of Phyllis Bodel Daycare Center, echoed a similar experience with Safa, an intern from a recent cohort of the Havenly Fellowship.

“Our hiring process includes an interview, during which I ask many questions, as well as one hour in the classroom. In the past, my current teachers have been very particular about who they work with, but Safa won both them and the students over immediately. She was on the floor with them, talking and playing. She didn’t know English, and yet she overcame that barrier with grace.”

Miller is especially grateful for Safa’s ability to speak Arabic, as it enables the daycare to connect with students who are being raised in bilingual households.

To close the event, Hala, one of two graduates of the Havenly Fellowship’s first cohort and a baker of five years for the University of New Haven’s dining service, Sodexo, spoke about her experience with the fellowship: ​“Thank you, Havenly, from the bottom of my heart. Now, I can use my passion to help others.”