Food with Purpose: Dudley Dough and Haley House Bakery Café

Abstract

Haley House has sustained a tradition of community service and community engagement since its founding in 1966. What began as a very personal project by its two founders to engage with homeless men in Boston’s South End neighborhood has grown over the years through creating two social enterprises, the Haley House Bakery Café and Dudley Dough. Building off the work of its South End Soup Kitchen, Haley House opened the Haley House Bakery Café in Boston’s Dudley neighborhood in 2005, training and employing workers with barriers to employment in a nearly self-sustaining nonprofit restaurant while offering delicious, healthy food in a vibrant community setting. Haley House welcomed the ideas and inspiration of Dudley residents, becoming a multifaceted hub for community engagement, all rooted in the food. When the City of Boston declared Dudley an Innovation District, Haley House launched Dudley Dough, a social enterprise pizza shop in the District’s anchor building, as a way to offer fair wage employment and an economic future for residents who might otherwise be priced out, and forced out, of the community. Throughout it all, Haley House has remained committed to providing “Food with Purpose,” and the strong community ties it engenders.