Graduate student opens bakery to provide jobs for homeless

By Danny Nett (02/06/14 12:36am)

Natalie Hoberman / The Daily Tar Heel

Allison Norman, a graduate student and founder of Made with Love Bakery, stands in front of the Foundry sign on Tuesday afternoon. The Foundry is the building that will house the bakery.

Although students often dread signing up for general education courses, a boring class was just what one student needed to realize her calling.

“I was taking notes, and somewhere between the Cold War and universalism, I stopped and I started sketching out this, you know, this idea,” said Allison Norman, a graduate student studying social work.

Two and a half years later, Norman is one step closer to realizing her life dream: opening Made with Love Bakery, a transitional employment opportunity for homeless individuals to receive job training — with a little added southern hospitality.

“It was a dream that was just kind of placed on my heart,” Norman said. “At first I laughed it off. I thought it was crazy, but within the week, I was like, ‘This is what I’m doing with my life.’”

Although Norman at first felt unprepared, she said she persisted with the mentality that she would learn the skills she needed as she worked.

She said she received help from friends, family and similar transitional employment bakeries. Norman has had to find ways around her limited experience in business, social work and even cooking itself.

“Before the idea of the bakery, the most I had ever baked was like, box brownies,” Norman said.

She first went to her Charlotte home, where her mother passed on family recipes, like the dish now known on the menu as “Mama Norman’s Homemade Bread.” From there, Norman began developing her own recipes.

Although Made with Love’s menu now includes brownies, cookies, cakes and breads, it had small beginnings. Norman said she began with baking communion bread for the church Love Chapel Hill without having an oven of her own.

She remembers the distress of driving risen bread down the road to the pastor’s house, going about two miles an hour, pleading with the bread not to collapse.

“This is such a simple thing, but it’s a beautiful story to me,” said Love Chapel Hill’s co-pastor Matt LeRoy . “It’s a person who is letting her faith lay all the way out in her life, you know, not just kind of keeping it as something she believes.”

Norman also found help in Kevin McDonald, president of Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers Inc., where she now interns. After meeting Norman, he decided to donate a commercial oven, a range and other equipment.

“That’s the future, man,” he said. “When someone has a passion in their heart for other people, and they have a dream, and their passion is real, well, if you can give a helping hand, it might just be part of making that dream come true.”

Norman’s dream — opening doors for those who she believes are often discriminated against and can make it out of poverty if given the chance — will be coming alive in Love Chapel Hill’s “Foundry” building on Sunrise Road in June.

Next year, she expects to begin with three employees, who in their second year will become trainers for three additional people.

“It’s happening, and it’s crazy because it was just, you know, a dream sketched out on a piece of notebook paper.”

university@dailytarheel.com

Originally Published: 02/05/14 8:24pm