New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘A place of learning and a place of community’
Havenly Café, a nonprofit cafe in downtown New Haven, trains immigrant and refugee women to work in restaurants, child care and more
Maria Torres didn’t have time for dreams.
That is, until she met the women of Havenly, and, what she described as a decades-long routine of sleep, work, cleaning, working some more and taking care of her family was disrupted by the first signs of opportunity outside of the home.
Havenly is a nonprofit café on Temple Street that trains immigrant and refugee women to enter, and, in some cases, re-enter the workforce amid cultural and language barriers. It was founded in 2018 by Neida Abbas, a refugee from Iraq, and Caterina Passoni, who migrated to the U.S. from Italy to study at Yale. Since its founding, 90 women have graduated from the program. Seven of those graduates have gone on to start their own businesses.
Torres last year opened Venezia Pizza in North Haven. Though she is a small business owner now, Torres said she wouldn’t have known ownership was even a possibility without Havenly.
Torres, 46, are her husband, Saul Flores, were married in their native Mexico when they were barely out of their teens. Torres was 20 when their daughter was born. The couple decided to migrate to the U.S., where they hoped to find better jobs and opportunities for their young family.
“We were young with a baby and didn’t have any profession — like being a teacher or a doctor,” Torres said. “That means you don’t have the option to do something for your daughter, for your son, for your children.”
Flores came first, followed by Torres a year later in 1999. After that, their young daughter, now a nurse, joined them in New Haven. Torres worked as a nanny, cleaning homes and spent 15 years working at a dry cleaner. But she was laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic and left with few options. Her daughter, who was starting studies at Yale University, told her about Havenly.
Havenly got its start as a project on Yale’s campus. Passoni volunteered with Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), a Connecticutbased nonprofit that helps refugees and displaced families start lives in the U.S. There she met Abbas.
Passoni said she initially worked with Abbas’ daughter but noticed Abbas herself was particularly isolated. Those types of stories became all too familiar to Passoni.
“I started hearing the same story over and over. That ‘my mom doesn’t have opportunities to learn English, doesn’t leave her house, is isolated,’” Passoni said. “Specifically, refugee mothers tended to be more isolated and more marginalized.”
Abbas had an extensive background in cooking. She ran kitchens in her home country of Iraq, then in Syria and Turkey as war spread and she worked to get her family accepted as refugees in the U.S. Passoni and Abbas capitalized on that experience by first selling baklava, a Middle Eastern dessert, on the Yale campus.
“Over time Neida and I grew closer. I graduated from college and I decided to stay,” Passoni said. “Every few months I’d say I would stay long enough to keep this going. And, maybe naively, thought it would take a few months to make that something that could
“All my sisters, we share stories about family, about being women.” Maria Torres
support women like Neida in having a small business.”
Passoni said as she and Abbas grew closer and worked on growing the baklava business, the pair realized there were a lot more women like Abbas in the local community and many opportunities for them within local restaurants.
“The idea became to open a restaurant together that could become a place of learning and a place of community,” Passoni said. “A temporary home and classroom for six months for refugee and immigrant women to then help them find a job or find education elsewhere.”
The women who enter the program are fellows. They work together in groups known as cohorts. First, there are two-and-a-half months of classroom training, including getting their food safety certification. The rest of the sixmonth program is dedicated to practical experience. The women work, usually parttime hours, in the café where they earn $16.50 an hour.
The cafe itself is born of Abbas’ experience in migration.
The café is colored in white and bold orange, symbolic of the life vests many refugees wear as they search for new homes, Pamela Javran, Havenly’s marketing director, said. The far wall, to the left when entering, is a chalkboard with the café’s message and its menu.
“We build the community power of refugee and immigrant women through job training, education, civic engagement,” the wall reads, adding, “Chef Neida makes wholesome and healthy food, just like she would make for her children at home.”
The café’s main menu traces Abbas’ journey. There’s the Baghdad Bowl, an homage to her Iraqi roots featuring curried chicken and peas over fragrant rice; the Damascus Bowl, a Syrian-inspired dish of spiced lentils and bulgur wheat with vegetables and tzatziki; the Istanbul Street Bites, a meat pie, hummus, tzatziki and french fries inspired by Abbas’s time in Turkey; and much more. The café also sells Turkish coffee served from a wood-handled cezve and the baklava that got the café its start.
And since the café started, the program — not just the menu — has expanded, Havenly employment specialist Nuha Ibrahim said. Havenly offers a career bridges program to help women with higher levels of education find jobs. The classes offered to all fellows include personal development courses like art and dance.
Torres said Havenly offered her and her husband a chance to pursue a dream they didn’t know they had. They helped with paperwork, applications and translation. But, she said, it also helped her find community among her fellow fellows and introduced her to a world that was bigger — and more similar — than she knew.
“One of my favorite things about Havenly is sharing the culture and seeing how the world is not so different and the women from other countries are not so different than the women from Latin America,” she said. “I learned about cultures from Iraq, Iran, Sudan. All my sisters, we share stories about family, about being women.”
She doesn’t feel alone, she said. She has a team now. It reminded her of a phrase her father used to say.
“A walk alone is nothing. But with all your family, the walk is strong,” she said, recalling the phrase. “I never figured it out until I came to Havenly and met all my sisters. I have a team. They support me emotionally. I have new friends. When I feel alone, I go to them. I always am for them and they always are for me.”
Havenly Café is located at 25 Temple St. It’s open from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. Friday through Wednesday and from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. on Thursday. The café is closed on Sundays.