Giving Compass' Take:

• Rubicon Bakery hires its employees whether they have criminal records or not, and ensures that they are getting the support and extra services that they need. 

• Why is it important for more businesses to see past criminal records? 

• Read about the New Profit accelerator program called Unlocked Futures, an initiative that helps entrepreneurs who have been affected by the criminal justice system. 

Deantee James spent around a year looking for a job before finding his current position as a baker in Richmond, California. “I was putting in applications and nothing was coming through,” he says. James has a criminal record, which makes it more difficult to find work; one study found that black men with a record only got called back for an interview 5% of the time. But Rubicon Bakers, where James now works, was deliberately designed to give people a second chance.

The bakery first launched as a job training program for a nonprofit more than 25 years ago, aimed at helping people with histories of addiction, homelessness, or incarceration find work. Now it’s a quickly growing business, with products in more than 2,500 stores. Over the last year, the number of employees nearly doubled.

For the grocery stores that sell the company’s cakes and cupcakes across the country, the product is key, not Rubicon’s mission, Stoloff says. The company works to offer what the market wants; at Whole Foods, that meant the recent introduction of a small cake made for two people. (The demand for this new product helped lead the bakery to hire nearly 100 people over the last year.)

“When you’re coming right out of prison, you have a lot of things to grapple with,” says Leslie Crary, the company’s human resources manager. “You have housing to grapple with . . . you may have transportation issues. Sometimes people come out of prison, and they may have a restriction on their ability to drive. So we try to take more of a broader view of those kinds of challenges and work with them.” In one case, for example, two employees had to leave work multiple times a week to go to a methadone clinic–something that a standard business probably wouldn’t have allowed.

Read the full article about bakery hires employees with criminal records by Adele Peters at Fast Company