LISA GOAD: When women come out of incarceration, we expect them to jump back into the community, get a job, find a place to live, and just be a part of the community.

But we make that really hard because there's all these barriers.

VIRGINIA ANDERSON: I had been addicted to drugs for many years and I finally went to treatment.

I have 121 days clean now and because of the drug use, I had been in jail before, which made me eligible for this program.

LISA GOAD: We started initially to serve women coming out of incarceration and help them integrate back into the community as they're trying to rebuild.

We have since expanded our umbrella, so we serve any under-resourced women.

There's lots of people who can use what we're offering that haven't necessarily been incarcerated, but the goal is just to build self-esteem and confidence.

We wanted to make it kitchen based so that our students are getting job experience in a kitchen, because that's a likely field for them to find employment.

But also, it's a really simple task and so when we have a group of women just working shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, making bread, kneading, mixing, all those kind of things, it doesn't require a lot of concentration, but it gives us a chance to have conversations.

For the students in our program, they come to the kitchen for four weeks.

They come twice a week, and we alternate between classroom skills, we teach a ServSafe food handler class, and we also teach interview skills and help them write resumes.

And then on the opposite weeks, we're in the kitchen and we're teaching kitchen skills and then also baking bread that we sell to customers.

And so, in conjunction with that, our students meet weekly with a mentor and the mentor is basically just a friend to walk alongside them through whatever it is they're dealing with right now.

We don't train, we don't recruit professionals, they're all just volunteers from the community.

SUSAN KESSLER: I've learned from these ladies.

There are some of them come with a lot of experience and some in the kitchen and some do not.

So, it's just kind of fun to to sit back and see how much they want to know and what they want to do and I like, you know, being able to share that with them.

I think the gratification of, you know, working really hard to mix something together and then when you see this come out of the oven, the excitement on their faces, they can't believe "I made that".

LISA GOAD: We are small.

In the seven years that we've been operating, we've had just under 90 women come through the program, and we don't intend to become huge, we like being small because we get to know the people that we're serving.

VIRGINIA ANDERSON: It's been good being involved in something with some of my peers and we have done the ServSafe certification classes, which is good for getting a job, to be able to put on a resume or anything like that.

It's also just been really therapeutic to get to work with the bread and to start with raw ingredients and to end up with the final product.

LISA GOAD: When a woman comes out of incarceration, she has made a mistake and she has served a sentence, and when she gets out is not the end of the sentence because there's stereotypes and barriers and labels, and you cannot be restored to the community if the community sees you as a felon or as a junkie.

You need the community to see you as a human being.

And so I think that to me is what restorative justice is, it's giving people an opportunity to be seen for the person that they are and not just their actions.