Cookies for a good cause
By Mike Mitchelson

Ever eaten a Cookie Cart cookie?

You might have. If you’ve donated blood at Memorial Blood Centers in and around the Twin Cities, the cookie you ate after the procedure was from Cookie Cart.

If you’ve attended events for a Twin Cities’ major law firm or bank and grabbed a cookie off a tray, that was a Cookie Cart cookie. Or, if as a client you received a gift of cookies from a law firm or bank, you’ve eaten a Cookie Cart cookie. (In fact, one Cookie Cart client recently bought $6,000 worth of cookies for corporate gifts.) Or, you might have gone directly to the source on West Broadway in North Minneapolis, bought a cookie and a cup of coffee, sat down and relaxed.

The Cookie Cart bakery last year sold about 33,000 dozen cookies, including about $31,000 worth in December. Not bad, particularly when you consider Cookie Cart is a 501(c)(3) non-profit business—it’s really a youth employment program disguised as a bakery.

Make no mistake, however, it’s the real deal. The recipes for 10 different cookies are their own, and made from scratch. The cookies are the classics, including chocolate chip, peanut butter, snickerdoodle, M&M, oatmeal raisin (and the editor’s personal favorite, chocolate chocolate chip). The product is good enough where it could become a self-sufficient bakery. But that isn’t the point, said Cookie Cart Executive Director Matt Halley. “As far as non-profits go, a nice chunk of our income is earned income,” he said. “But as we’ve looked at it, and the Board of Directors has thought about it, in order to be self sustaining it would be more like a manufacturing plant than a youth training program. We want to keep the emphasis on youth training. There’s overhead with that—we wouldn’t need two adults with the kids. There would be one bakery manager saying, ‘Move faster.’ It’s a philosophical decision to not do that.”


Origins

The Cookie Cart officially was founded in 1988, but the program started informally a few years earlier by a Catholic nun, Sister Jean Thuerauf. “She started having kids come to her home after school, and for her it was a means of gang prevention, to keep them off the street,” Halley said. “She would help them with their homework and they would bake cookies.”

Thuerauf, still a member of the Cookie Cart’s Board of Directors, began selling cookies the children made to area churches. The venture proved successful, and eventually a baking facility was needed. “General Mills and McGlynn Bakeries were both instrumental in getting the start up equipment and startup bakery space for the formal program,” Halley said.

Thuerauf was working with children aged nine to 11 at that time. Now, the bakery employs teens ages 14 to 16.

“What’s unique about this program is we hire the kids for their first job,” said Bakery Manager Hayley Tompkins. They receive practical training, but, most importantly, learn how to conduct and prepare themselves for more schooling or a job after high school, including following rules and taking responsibility for their actions, she added. “We’re the bridge between. Not everyone gets that kind of coaching, either at home or at school. They’re very good employees when they leave here.”

The bakery employs about 50 teens, with about nine to 15 three-hour, after-school shifts, she said, targeting kids from North Minneapolis.

North Minneapolis has one of the highest rates of crime and violence in the metropolitan area. “It’s a federally designated Empowerment Zone—it gets that designation by its rates of crime and poverty,” Halley said. “The kids we work with generally aren’t getting some of those basic employment skills at home or through their community, like maybe a middle class kid would get.”

The teaching often starts when the youth walks in the door and asks for an application. “They might have a Big Mac in one hand, and they say, ‘You got any jobs here?’” Halley said. “We start right there, ‘Welcome to the Cookie Cart, here you are making your first impression today. Why don’t you put the hamburger down and introduce yourself to me, and shake my hand, and how can I help you?’ Right from there we set a tone, this is about learning what’s going to fly in a more traditional setting and we talk about that very openly and directly.”


Baking success

The Cookie Cart is a hit in the area—they do no active recruitment and always have a waiting list for employment. The kids’ primary responsibility is to take wads of dough (prepared in-house by a professional mixer), scoop out a cookie-sized portion and place those portions on baking trays. Then Tompkins bakes them. The kids are also responsible for cookie decorating, packaging, filling order slips, customer service and cleanup. The operation is kept simple and efficient. “Every time we’re tempted to throw cheesecakes or croissants into the mix, we remind ourselves that youth employment is first, and cookies are our tool,” Halley said.

As kids gain experience, they can take on added responsibility, and add a small amount to their minimum wage. Older teens who’ve worked in the program for a time can enroll in the 360 Degree program, Tompkins said. “It’s job readiness training—what they need and how to do an interview, how they should look, and how to develop a resume.”

Some kids do go on to foodservice or baking jobs once they’ve left Cookie Cart, but they are still in high school when they “age out” of the bakery, Halley said. “We want them to be open and more ready than when they came in here to go to college, or, if so inclined, to work a traditional job after high school,” he said. “We’re not trying to train them to be bakers in particular, but to have them keep their options open. They go away from here with a positive recommendation and a good feeling about working.”