Cypress House Bakery, a nonprofit based in a building attached to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, is a training program that will teach formerly incarcerated people baking and culinary skills. Here, the program’s operations manager, Brian Goble, far right, reviews kitchen renovation plans with architects and construction managers, including the Rev. Susan Treanor, center right, an Episcopal priest who previously ran a construction management consultant agency. Photo: Helen Wolf
[Episcopal News Service] Pennsylvania has one of the highest recidivism rates in the United States: on average, over 50% of formerly incarcerated people will get rearrested or reincarcerated.
The congregation at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in downtown Scranton is hoping to reduce that percentage by launching the nonprofit Cypress House Bakery, a 6-month job training program that will teach formerly incarcerated people baking and culinary skills. Those skills and a support network established by the church and its partners will help graduates find jobs.
“Cypress House is a way for us to show previously incarcerated people that we love and care for them by connecting them with the resources that they need to succeed as they restart their lives,” the Rev. Tyler J. Parry, priest-in-charge of St. Luke’s and president and CEO of Cypress House, told Episcopal News Service. “Being seen as a beloved human being is so important, especially with this demographic of people who may not find it anywhere else.”
Parry, who also serves as priest-in-charge of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Moscow, has served as a prison chaplain throughout Pennsylvania.
“In our society, we look at currently incarcerated or formerly incarcerated folks, not as people, but as their crimes,” Parry said. “We look at them and say, ‘Your past is something that’s an impediment to the kind of human-to-human connection that you need in order to heal,’ but … they are, in fact, human beings.”
Pennsylvania’s State Transition Reentry Incentive Validating Endeavors program, which helps formerly incarcerated people transition back to life outside of prison, will connect Cypress House with potential students, up to eight at a time, with four students in each of two cohorts, daytime and nighttime.
Four or five days a week, 20 hours total, students will learn baking techniques, food safety and business management. While enrolled, they will be paid hourly through a living stipend.
“It’s something to help them get by while they’re training,” Helen Wolf, Cypress House’s vice president, told ENS.
Graduates will earn a Pennsylvania Food Handler Certificate.
Unemployment drives recidivism. Previously incarcerated people can have a difficult time finding a job for several reasons, including employer bias and, often, a lack of post-secondary education and employable skills.
As the program is set to launch later this month, Cypress House’s board of directors has recently hired Asa Frost to oversee it. Her duties include designing the curriculum and serving as the program’s baking instructor.
Plans to establish Cypress House began in 2015, when St. Luke’s congregation debated the best use of an underutilized building. While they researched Scranton’s biggest needs, the church’s previous rector, the Rev. Rebecca Barnes, learned about Homeboy Industries. The Los Angeles, California-based project, founded by the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, is the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. It provides clients with job experience, training and a supportive community.
After realizing that Scranton had no similar program, the Episcopal congregation agreed to renovate the building’s kitchen to create a training space. Construction began in 2018 after they established a nonprofit organization and began raising money, including $300,000 for the kitchen renovation project. Fundraising and construction halted in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and resumed in 2022. In 2023, Cypress House received a $50,000 United Thank Offering grant.
Cypress House will be a Homeboy Industries’ global network affiliate.
While fundraising and renovating the building, Barnes and Cypress House’s board of directors developed relationships with local bakeries and other businesses to help future graduates find jobs.
“With these bakery skills, graduates will open the door to not just getting hired at hospitals or hotels, but also to operating a standalone bakery or catering business,” Brian Goble, Cypress House’s operations manager, told ENS. “There will be many possibilities out there for them.”
Barnes left St. Luke’s in 2024 to serve as dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, New York. Parry said he was easily able to continue Barnes’s work with Cypress House because he already had served on the nonprofit’s board of directors and because of his prison ministry background.
Through local connections Barnes made, Cypress House additionally will connect students and graduates with “wraparound” services, such as résumé writing assistance, professional networking and physical and mental health assistance, including trauma support from being incarcerated.
“Cypress House’s short-term goal is to get folks on their feet with a full-time job somewhere, but the long-term goal is to build relationships and learn from each other based on where our lives have taken us,” Wolf said. “Hopefully, graduates, if they want, will want to mentor others coming out of incarceration. Whatever they decide, our doors will never close on them.”
-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.