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When Lucie Buchbinder brought the Bread Project to town last April, she joined the ranks of food visionaries who’ve made Berkeley famous for culinary innovation infused with a passion for justice. 

Like Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse and Edible Schoolyard and Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet,” the Bread Project is dedicated to the deceptively simple idea that food should be good. It should taste good. It should look good. It should be good for you. And it should be good for other people—namely, those who grow and prepare it.  

Honoring all these goals, the Bread Project is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help people escape poverty by teaching them not only a trade—baking—that will lead to a career but also the skills that will help them find and keep a job. The program operates in two venues—the San Francisco Baking Institute in South San Francisco and the Berkeley Adult School. 

Just a year-and-a-half-old, the Bread Project has received awards from Alameda County Social Services for innovation in sustainability and from Sustainable San Mateo County for contributing to the social sustainability of San Francisco County, along with Supervisorial, State, and Congressional commendations.  

Buchbinder, the project’s co-founder and executive director, talked about the project against a background of industrial-strength kitchen clatter and bustle in the Berkeley Adult School cafeteria.  

“The Bread Project got started,” says Buchbinder, “when my friend Susan Phillips and I, who were both involved in the development and management of subsidized housing, realized that our tenants needed jobs, and that most of them lacked training….We did some research and discovered that baking was a rapidly growing activity in the Bay Area. All these artisan breads were suddenly becoming popular, and supermarkets were building in-house bakeries.” 

Baking suited the needs of their prospective students. 

“You don’t need to speak perfect English; you don’t need an academic background—you don’t need to have a high school education even; you don’t have to have great skills to begin. All you have to have is a real interest in food,” Buchbinder said.  

The Bread Project opened its doors in South San Francisco in January 2001 and in Berkeley in April 2003. The program has an annual budget of $240,000--$180,000 in South San Francisco and $60,000 a year in Berkeley—less here because the school district pays the teachers’ salaries and provides the kitchen, utilities and telephones at no charge. 

Financial support has come from individual donors, foundations, corporations and private and public agencies, including Alameda County Social Services, Oakland Youth Employment Partnership, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, Wells Fargo, the Cisco Foundation, and the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation. 

The course is free to the students. Project director Buchbinder is a full-time volunteer. She and Assistant Director Lily Divito work out of a tiny room off the Adult School kitchen lined with racks of baking supplies.  

A visitor to the Bread Project finds the Adult School’s cavernous cafeteria filled with the sweet smell of freshly baked sticky buns and the kitchen alive with students in long white aprons, measuring and mixing ingredients, setting dough to rise, checking bread in the oven and cleaning up while Charlotte McDuffie stretched hard roll dough over her fingers to see if it had risen enough to go into the oven. 

She was “looking for the gluten window.” “If I can see my fingers, and it looks nice and silky without tearing, it’s ready”—as, she decided, this batch was.  

Around the corner, head teacher Betsy Riehle was conferring with another student over one of the kitchen’s giant Hobart mixers. “Every mistake you’ve made,” she told him, “I’ve made already.” 

In this case, the error was having set the mixer at too high a speed. Riehle described how early in her career, she had once done the same thing and ended up covered with sugar.  

Riehle is the bakery manager at the Fat Apple shops in Berkeley and El Cerrito. During a break she talked of the challenges of teaching at the Bread Project. 

“People have this image of baking from the Food Channel,” she said, “that it’s snazzy and fun and a lot of glory. And the reality is it’s hard work and a lot of repetition. A few people are famous and everybody else is just slugging it out day to day. I like that aspect; I have no desire to be famous. I stress that a lot in my class. I think there’s a dawning realization as the class proceeds that it’s not quite how they imagined it. Some of them love it even more, and some of them don’t like that direction.”  

Riehle learned her trade at the Dunwoodie Institute in Minneapolis, recently closed, but, she said, for fifty years the top school for American retail baking.  

“When I went to school I was very fortunate to have terrific instructors. I feel as if I’m maybe giving something back to the profession.” And she feels lucky to be returning the favor at the Bread Project. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for these people. A lot of them have very difficult situations. They have child care issues, it’s difficult for them to have money for bus fare to get here.” 

What drives them, she says, is that “a lot of them want to get a new start in their life.”  

In Berkeley about half the students are recruited at the Adult School through the project’s flyers and its baked goods. Others learn about the course through the Community Re-Entry Program of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office or the Alameda County Housing Authority. 

“We do outreach to homeless shelters,” says Buchbinder, “and to the one-stop centers for the unemployed such as CalWorks.” The students include people in recovery programs, incarcerated individuals on work furlough, people who are getting off welfare, immigrants and dislocated workers.  

One requirement for admission is a minimal command of English; students must be able to read the recipes and follow what a teacher says. Applicants must also be drug- and alcohol-free, without prior back injury and able to lift fifty pounds. 

School begins at 8 a.m. with a one-hour class, followed by baking for the rest of the day. 

“They have to be able to stay on their feet eight hours a day with just two breaks and a lunch hour,” explains Buchbinder, “because that’s what they’re going to face on the job.”  

They also have to be punctual. “They get dinged if they’re not on time.” Given these demands, I imagined that most of the students would be younger people. Not so. “We have students from 18 to 76,” Buchbinder told me. “And we have quite a few students in their 50s who’ve been laid off from Silicon Valley or who are recent immigrants and who want jobs.”  

Just as important as the culinary lessons is the education in life skills and job readiness. Bread Project students learn about where bakers work (it’s not just in the artisan bakeries dear to many Berkeley residents.) Says Buchbinder, “There are 25 different places where bakers can be employed, many places they wouldn’t think of looking, including airports, airlines, shipping lines, yachts, personal staffs, culinary temporary agencies, school districts, hospitals, prisons, jails.”  

They also learn how to get a job. Before the end of the class, each student must fill out perfect applications for bakery jobs at Safeway, COSTCO and Whole Foods--places where most of them can get hired with good entry-level benefits. 

“They learn about what to look for,” says Buchbinder. “It isn’t just the wages; it’s the benefits you get with them. We always have a representative from the Bakery Union. And for those that want to start their own little businesses, we have outside speakers coming from the Oakland Business Development Corporation. And we have someone from the Alameda County Housing Authority’s Self-Sufficiency program to talk about career development.”  

Applicants must be willing and able to accept employment in the food industry upon graduation. They must also be prepared to cooperate with program staff in a one-year follow-up of their employment careers. So far, over 100 very low-income men and women have been served. To date, 96 percent of those enrolled have graduated, 78 percent have found jobs, and a year after graduating 61 percent are still working.  

These numbers will grow, if Lucie Buchbinder has her way. She’d like to open a third Bread Project venue in the East Bay. 

“There’s such a need in East Oakland and in Richmond for this kind of program,” she says. She’d also like to start a café-bakery where her students can get internships and employment.  

On Saturday, Oct. 4, a High Tea to benefit the Bread Project will be held at 12 El Sueno in Orinda from 3-5 p.m. For more information, call 644-4575.