Anthonette Sims wants to be a pediatrician when she grows up. This is among the first things you learn about the 16-year-old, soon after meeting her — after, of course, she has her turn interviewing you: What do you do? Why did you choose that career? What do you like about it?
And while she’s talking, warmly making eye contact, Sims quickly lines round scoops of cookie dough up on a sheet pan and pushes each one down with her gloved fist. She finishes two trays and starts her third while we chat.
Sims is in her third year as a baker at the Cookie Cart, a bakery and job-training program in North Minneapolis. For her and her fellow bakers, all 14 to 17 years old, this is a first job, which means a first exposure to applications, interviews, paychecks, FICA deductions, and bank accounts. They are learning — many for the first time — what it means to be an employee, to come to work on time, to work as a team, and to serve customers.
The cookies, tasty as they are, are just a happy byproduct.
“We’re trying to prepare kids for the traditional workforce,” says Executive Director Matt Halley. “This is not career training. We’re not trying to teach them to be master bakers. We could be making widgets here, but we make cookies because they’re fun.”
Halley says the learning starts the moment each kid walks in the door and, while we sit and talk at a café table in the sunny Cookie Cart storefront on West Broadway, two teens come in to request applications. Not all potential employees pass that first test with flying colors: Halley remembers a young woman who came in with a Big Mac in hand — and in her mouth — while she asked about employment, and another who demanded, before even filling out the form, “How much will I get paid?”
“And that’s okay,” Halley says, because he and his staff see it as their job to offer gentle lessons from that first moment of contact until the employees have learned enough and are chomping at the bit to move into other jobs.
“We will invite back kids who have walked out because they were embarrassed about being reprimanded,” he explains.
Today there are about 55 youth employees — and even more on a waitlist — who work with a staff of five adults in a spotlessly clean and meticulously organized modern commercial kitchen. But the Cookie Cart started, a little more than 20 years ago, with an actual cart. It was red and parked in front of the Church of the Ascension on Bryant Avenue, a fixture in the neighborhood and in many residents’ memories.
In the mid-1970s, Sister Jean Theurauff, a young nun with the Sisters of Mercy, left a comfortable assignment teaching school in Edina to serve the people of North Minneapolis. She reached out to the young people of the neighborhood, inviting them into a bare house furnished with second-hand goods for meetings of the Courtesy Club. For attendance, they earned badges and yellow T-shirts with the letters “CC” on them. She would later reuse them for the Country Club when they gardened and the Cookie Club, when the kids crowded into her small kitchen to make cookies.
She had one oven and one big yellow bowl. Three kids baked while three kids sold cookies to passersby from the cart. They bought ingredients for the next day’s cookies with the proceeds of each day’s sales. But, to keep them motivated, and to keep them coming back to her house, rather than being lured into a gang, Sister Jean had to dangle a carrot.
“I told them if they saved a certain amount, they could have their own store,” she laughs, admitting that she had no idea how much it would take to open a store, or whether it would even be possible.
At one point, 103 kids were regulars at Sister Jean’s little parish house. She remembers that precise number and says, with obvious pain, that she lost 10 kids to gang violence over the years. But the ones who survived are now in their 30s and 40s, and she still runs into them as she makes her rounds about the neighborhood.
“Just the other day a man stopped me and asked ‘Do you still have that yellow bowl?’” she laughs. “After so many years, they had beat the bottom out of it!”
The bowl is gone, but the Cookie Cart thrives. Each day, the youth workers make 200 to 500 dozen cookies, most of them for corporate and event clients. The weeks leading up to Christmas are their busiest, when Anthonette Sims and her fellow employees will scoop and bake more than 1,500 dozen.
Tricia Cornell edits Minnesota Parent.
