Hot Bread Kitchen founder Jessamyn Waldman, a 2008 Echoing Green Fellow, was covered by the New York Post this week. Jessamyn recruits immigrant women who developed traditional baking skills in their former home countries to bake gourmet-quality breads.  In exchange, Hot Bread Kitchen offers its bakers opportunities for professional advancement within the organization, as well as classes in English, computers, and entrepreneurial skills, so that they may be better equipped to start their own businesses later on. The baked goods the women produce are sold in stores and farmers markets throughout New York City.

As the article highlights, Hot Bread combines two very distinct interests of Jessamyn’s in immigrant justice and baking.  What resulted is an innovative strategy for helping women use their talents to fill a niche in their new culture without erasing traces of previous ones.  Jessamyn helps her bakers fine-tune their skills to an expertise, so that they may benefit from existing market structures that would have been much harder to access. 

The Queens-based bakery has been successful thus far, and Jessamyn hopes to spread Hot Bread Kitchen to other locations around the country in the future.