Havenly Café recognized, thanked its incredible community partners who employ refugee and immigrant women from our job training program.

Representatives from Havenly Café drove a brand new Kia Carnival off the lot Tuesday, a gift from Lindy Lee Gold and the Amour Propre Fund.

Though the academic scene continues to imbue this coastal Connecticut city with a certain gravitas, surrounding neighborhoods are showing off their own cultural capital in the realms of art, food, music and more.

In wake of pandemic, wave of retirements, $70M CareerConneCT targets communities with historically low labor force participation; over 1,200 job placements so far.

The nonprofit cafe in New Haven trains immigrant and refugee women to work in restaurants, child care and more.

Local bakers, daycare leaders, and healthcare providers came together to celebrate the success of a downtown cafe’s efforts to get New Haven employers to hire refugee and immigrant women.

Roya Mohammadi radiated light. Her sisters are not going to stop telling her story until they know what happened to her. 

New Haven nonprofit Havenly helps immigrant, refugee women establish economic, civic, and community power through job training, education.

Many things drew Ana Hernandez to the Havenly fellowship program: She would be one of 15 women, immigrants and refugees from around the world, who would receive culinary training, and would help run the Havenly Cafe. She would earn money while working and as she learned, taking classes in English, digital and financial literacy. What she hadn’t expected to discover was a sisterhood.

Camila Guiza-Chavez asked a roomful of women — mostly refugees, many facing housing insecurity — if anyone had applied for the city’s new federally funded, pandemic-era housing assistance programs. 

“No,” was the unanimous reply. 

Then she asked if anyone in the room had even heard of these programs. She was met again with a resounding: ​“No.”

Entisar Elamin was chopping parsley Monday for a batch of baba ganoush when a parade of official visitors popped in with their own recipe — for helping other women like her make it in the Connecticut economy.

Elamin, a refugee from Sudan, was at work in the kitchen of Havenly Treats within the cavernous strip of storefronts across from Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street.

“Each time we come feeling more strong in calling this a political failure,” said Camila Guiza-Chavez, an organizer with the Sisters in Diaspora Collective, a group of local immigrant and refugee women that has called on the city to spend $62.5 million in ARPA aid on housing programs.

Since the light has shone brightly through one open door after another, the dynamic duo has welcomed dozens of other refugee and immigrant women. The café stands out so uniquely because of their integrative and inspiring atmosphere. Any and all new hires grow into the diverse,Havenlyfamily through their six-week fellowship program that has drastically evolved since their first fellowship.

In the Baghdad Bowl, Nieda Abbas channels the flavors of her first home country with curried chicken, rice, peas, carrots and almonds sliced whisper thin. In the Sakarya Bowl, she adds roasted beef meatballs, a fragrant tomato sauce, and a lemony, green tabbouleh from her years as a refugee in Turkey.