BRIDGE BREAD BAKERY

Bridge Bread seeks to empower people who have experienced homelessness to rebuild their lives with meaningful employment.

Our own Bakery is a highly successful social enterprise that demonstrates that people who have experienced homelessness are eager to work hard and can be valuable employees that earn decent wages. We are a hand up, not a handout to our Bakers. This promotes their self worth and accounts for our success rate.

We want to grow our social enterprise to employ more Bakers making and selling more products through more channels so we can provide further opportunities in all areas of a small business.

Working with social work and business school departments at local universities and with progressive businesses, we intend to find ways to replicate this success in for-profit businesses in many additional kinds of business.

Bridge Bread takes its business responsibilities very seriously and strives to create a business model that is as self-sufficient, scalable, and sustainable as it can be.

We accept donations as a challenge to us to find ways to invest in our program to make it serve our goals in ever broader ways.

Our products are hand made artisan breads and sweet rolls that we sell at below market rates for the kind and quality of product in order to appeal to as broad a range of customer as we can.

Currently program income from product sales covers our Bakers wages and employer overhead and the cost of the ingredients - the cost of goods sold. In the future, we expect economies of scale to make it possible to cover rent, utilities, and insurance.

We continue to rely on volunteers and partner agencies for professional skills with no paid staff except the Bakers. This makes the business model work.

Over the last five years, we have built a Bakery complete with ovens, mixers, proofers, cooler, walk-in freezer, work and storage areas and everything needed to support the Bakers' employment.

We have built a durable team of Bakers so that a new Baker immediately connects with others that have also experienced homelessness and have been able to rebuild their lives through Bridge Bread's supportive employment.

We have built relationships and business processes that enable us to sell our products through over 50 churches.
We have opened two retail locations to sell directly to the public.
All sales channels also provide opportunities to engage with the community and focus on issues of homelessness, poverty, and social justice.

We have a highly-qualified Board that includes leaders from business, churches, schools, and a member that has experienced homelessness.

We watch our budget very carefully and have no debt and adequate cash reserves that we can accept and deploy donations to expand the program.

We have been successful in providing supportive employment that succeeds in rebuilding shattered lives.
We have engaged with a geographically and denominational diverse collection of churches and schools,
Our business model is sound and our partnerships with other social agencies meet our needs.

We have not penetrated religious organizations beyond Christian denominations. We hope to engage with a temple and a mosque soon.

We have not achieved our goals in connecting with the business community. We expect our initiatives in Corporate Bake Sales and Business Rewards will move us forward in this area.

We are still exploring partnerships and relationships to encourage and support replicating our success more broadly.