General Information: Overview: Press Clips: Greyston Bakery Part II: Sweet Success: At Greyston Bakery, The Formerly Hard-Core Unemployed Turn Their Lives Around While Turning Out Delectable Desserts

Newsday
March 2, 2004

While sitting in an elegant Manhattan restaurant, savoring the triple chocolate mousse cake from Greyston Bakery, you'd hardly give a thought to Steve Gill, who once spent six years behind bars.

At home, watching TV and crunching on Ben & Jerry's popular chocolate fudge brownie ice cream - with the cookie bits from Greyston's - you aren't likely to ponder the life of Mohammed Kasheem, a young man from Bangladesh who struggled to find a decent job.

You might love the sweets from Greyston's old factory in Yonkers but probably never heard of Maulette Anderson - a single mother with no vocational skills when she found a better life at the bakery. Now, she decorates the fanciest cakes like an expert.

Gill and his co-workers - about 60 of them - are employed at Greyston's time-worn plant on Woodworth Avenue , once a lasagna factory in the 1920s. It's located in a sad and slightly foreboding neighborhood a few blocks from the Hudson River in southwest Yonkers .

Most of the workers are people who have often been described as the most unemployable and expendable in America . Among them are new immigrants and members of minorities, people who dropped out of school, fell into trouble with the law, never learned the rules of the workplace or how to support themselves.

At the bakery, they get a regular paycheck, on-the-job training, a chance for advancement and a taste of dignity. Bathed in the permeating aroma of chocolate, many have found an unexpectedly sweet life here, in unpromising surroundings where a passerby would hardly suspect the artistry in flour and sugar going on within.

Greyston's ovens work around the clock, three shifts a day, to produce brownies by the thousands, as well as such mouth-watering excesses as coconut lemon mousse cake, ivory mocha mousse cake, Venetian wine cake and its bestseller, triple chocolate mousse cake.

Most cakes are bound for top-scale restaurants - though Greyston itself often does not get its just desserts. The cakes are fully credited on the menu, for instance, at the National Arts Club in Manhattan , but many other classy eateries silently imply that the baked goods came from their own ovens. They're that good.

But that's acceptable - the Greyston Bakery is much more than the sum of its calories.

Profits in dough

The Greyston Bakery, once an experiment in job-making, has become the for-profit wing of the Greyston Foundation. After taxes, the bakery profits are "contributed" to the foundation to support its growing community assistance program.

With an annual operating budget of $13.5 million, the foundation's projects include housing for formerly homeless, low- income and working families, as well as child-care services, educational and scholarship programs, an adult health care center serving about 180 people, parenting classes, a drug abuse program and housing for people living with HIV/AIDS.

The creation of the bakery and the foundation was a dream come true for a Brooklyn-born, Jewish aerospace-engineer-turned-Buddhist activist named Bernie Glassman .

A lifelong advocate of progressive causes, Glassman was living in California , where he became entranced with the altruistic principles of Zen Buddhism. After his conversion, he studied at the Zen Center in Los Angeles and became a teacher and priest. By 1980, he was ready for action.

"Social action had always been a part of who I was, and I wanted to return to New York to start a Zen center there and to get involved in social issues," Glassman said. His first move was to open a tiny bakery in a Bronx storefront in 1982. "It was a Zen training center and also a way of earning money, so we could start working in the community."

In 1985, Glassman was able to move the baking operations to Yonkers , where his focus was on the neighborhood, beset with the problems of single-parent families, the poor and the homeless. And the work of the Greyston Foundation began.

It was Glassman's dream to offer a wide range of social services, including housing and child care, to both employees and people in the community. From the start, Glassman hired people who had the most difficulty finding employment - people who had been in jails, in youth detention, without job skills.

Meanwhile, Glassman recruited help from the Zen community in San Francisco to help train people. And soon enough, Greyston's gourmet cakes were winning awards.

"We were working with folks who were supposedly untrainable and unusable - and they created top-of-the-line products. That was what I was looking to do - to create things that were beautiful with folks who society felt couldn't do anything. It was a Zen idea: to create a profit-making enterprise to support a spiritual and social goal."

Brownies, cakes and tarts

At the Greyston plant, work went on nonstop as usual on a recent afternoon. The air was filled with the heady aroma of brownies. On the production floor, everyone was wearing white coats, white shower caps and beard masks - the required dress code - to keep hair from falling into the mix.

In the cakes-and-tarts section, Mohammed Kasheem was supervising final touches on the triple chocolate mousse cakes. Kasheem, 31, started as a dishwasher in 1993 and now is supervisor of Greyston's production of baked desserts.

Nearby, Maulette Anderson sculpted little curlicues of frosting atop a chocolate almond cake.

In the brownie department, Rodney Johnson is boss. A former crack dealer, Johnson gave up the street life to take an entry-level job here. Now, he's in charge of the department, which produces 10,000 pounds of brownies a day, most of them trucked to the Ben & Jerry's ice cream plant in Vermont .

The bakery's credo is displayed throughout the plant: It reads in part: "Greyston Bakery provides a support ive workplace, offering employment and opportunity for advancement. Our profits contribute to the community development work of the Greyston Foundation."

At street level, cakes were on sale to walk-in customers in an office big enough for a couple of desks. Baked goods also are available online and at Greyston's new cafe in downtown Yonkers .

A dimly lit, rickety staircase leads visitors to the cramped offices on the second and third floors. Just 8,000 square feet in area, the old plant does not look much like the home of a business grossing $5 million a year. But in April, the bakery will move to a new home a few blocks away - to a light and airy factory designed by Maya Lin, the noted architect who created the Vietnam Memorial in Washington .

The $9 million project, with 24,000 square feet, has high ceilings and many skylights and will allow Greyston to double or perhaps triple its production volume, said Greyston Foundation president David Sweeney.

Lin, who donated a portion of her services, said she was attracted by the Greyston Foundation's commitment to help the homeless, unemployed and needy.

"I couldn't resist getting drawn into it," she said during an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes." "One, because of what they do. Two, it's sort of a very happy, very fun, very challenging design problem."

Boundless opportunities

Julius Walls wears his white shower cap all day, even in his office. It has become a symbol of his solidarity with all his fellow employees.

He still feels Greyston is a special place. He was working as a salesman for a chocolate manufacturer in 1992 when he first visited the plant on Woodworth Avenue .

"I knew nothing about Greyston's mission," Walls recalled, "but when I came into the building, I was surprised to see who had been hired. Not necessarily who was on the factory floor, but who was working in the offices, on the management team. Seeing people of color there was a rarity, even in Yonkers . I was intrigued."

Growing more interested in the Greyston experiment, he joined the bakery soon after as a consultant and later became director of marketing. A protege of Bernie Glassman , Walls was named president and chief operating officer in 1997.

The bakery's mission has always been to work with "a rejected portion" of society, he noted. "I believe opportunity is truly opportunity only if one has the resources to be successful. What we try to do here is not only provide jobs but provide the resources for people to become successful."

With success, workers do move on after learning work skills at the bakery.

"We don't worry about that," Walls said. "It is what we call path-making. Everyone is on a path in life, and we don't take the selfish view that the only thing good in a person's life is what they can do for Greyston."

But, Walls noted, "it's up to the employees to show they can handle the job and, with our support , to have the wherewithal to keep it. We don't lower the bar."

Many so-called "unemployables" never learned the rules of the workplace, he said. "So we make it very clear what employees need to do. If they fail evaluations during their apprenticeship, they are terminated." But, Walls added, "We also remember there's a human being at the other end of the process."

A life-changing move

For Wendy Powell, apprenticeship was a first step nine years ago when she was homeless with a child to support . "I found Greyston's when I needed a place to live for me and my son," said Powell, who is 37.

"Greyston was providing housing and child-care for homeless families, and when I moved in, I heard about a job in bookkeeping." It was a life-changing move, she said. Five years later, after a series of promotions, she was asked to become chief assistant to Walls.

Steve Gill, steely-eyed and intense, was also eager to talk about his pre-Greyston life. "Before I came here, I was incarcerated," he said.

He had spent six years behind bars, his second run-in with the law. "When I came home the first time, there were jobs, but I didn't see myself working for nobody. You know what I mean?" But, he said, prison changed everything. "I knew I had to stop what I was doing because it wasn't the life I wanted. And Greyston allowed me to be me."

Last year, he completed work on an associate's degree in computer technology and took an entry-level job at the bakery. "When I was released from incarceration, I knew I had to get a degree if I ever wanted to make decent money. It was a step up in my life. Julius Walls calls it 'a path.' I call it a rite of passage."

He started in production, learning to bake brownies. When he completed his degree, the Greyston people thought his skills could be used elsewhere, and he was promoted to chief purchasing clerk late last year.

Now, at 35, Gill does not want his 11- year-old daughter to grow up without a father, as he did. "I knew I didn't want to walk in the footsteps of my father. He wasn't a bad man, but he was never there for me. I didn't want her to go down that same road."

Jim Ross, the shipping supervisor, came to Greyston six years ago, when he was somewhat adrift, moving from job to job. "I really didn't know what I wanted, but you got to have a job to survive." At the bakery, he discovered that promotion was possible. "Most places, they hire supervisors from outside. Here, they expect you to move up or else move on to a better job."

Three years ago, he was promoted to shipping supervisor, and he isn't looking for a new job. If people need a job, he said, they need to be persistent. "Looking for a job is like anything else - like looking for a girlfriend - you can only inquire, and they can only say yes or no. If the answer is no, you're only back where you started."

Spin-off success

Bernie Glassman left his job as Greyston president in 1997, moving to Massachusetts to start a Zen-related activist project called the Peacemaker Community. "Greyston was in solid shape, and I was ready to move on," Glassman said in a phone interview. "I wanted to take the holistic techniques I used at Yonkers to use them on the global scene. So for three years, our focus has been in the Middle East , in Jordan , Palestine and Israel , trying to get nonprofit agencies there to work together."

At Greyston, the turning point had come in 1987 at a conference in Colorado . There, Glassman met two like-minded entrepreneurs who shared his sense of social responsibility: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co- founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.

Over the years, being a regular supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry's meant many more entry-level jobs in the bakery and more income for the foundation's work in the Yonkers community.

"I had wanted to do something that would involve a lot more training of folks with zero skills," Glassman recalled. "I wanted to create an environment demonstrating the interdependence of life.... The big question was how to bring spirituality - an awareness of the oneness of life - to the marketplace. I looked to create that atmosphere where people felt that."

By the mid-1990s, the Greyston Foundation also was pursuing that goal. In addition to the bakery's growing profits, the foundation is support ed by philanthropic donors, charitable foundations and a variety of social agencies.

"Greyston still operates with the principles instilled by its founder," said foundation president Sweeney. "We try to cultivate all parts of the person and the community - from providing employment to enhancing spiritual life."