Baklava, a definition: a pastry originating in the Middle East made of many paper thin dough layers filled with chopped nuts and soaked in honey. Preparation time: 30-40 minutes. Bake time: 45-55 minutes.

One year ago, “Havenly Treats” could have been found at some of Yale University’s College Butteries, a late night café in each residential college that serve snacks long after dining halls have closed. Today, however, Havenly’s Baklava can not only be found at seven of Yale’s butteries but also at five other locations on campus and online.

Parker alum Ben Weiss ‘16, currently in his junior year at Yale University, is the co Executive Director and co Founder of “Havenly Treats,” a bakery “which is collaboratively run by Yale students and local refugee chefs.”

Havenly Treats Baklava is baked by female refugees. All revenue from the sales of Baklava goes directly to the chefs and chef partners. Everything else that is needed to run the bakery, like packaging, is paid for through donations and fundraising.

“By keeping those two streams separate we feel like we are able to maximize our impact,” Weiss said.

This semester Havenly Treats started a four-month long fellowship and job placement program which aims “to help female refugees break down the barriers that they face to employment.” There are currently two fellows who train in the kitchen with Havenly’s Head Chef, Nieda Abbas, and are receiving instruction in classes on subjects from financial literacy, digital literacy, taxes, and a ServSafe certification.

“Our focus right now is expanding the fellowship program,” Coordinator of the Operations Team Will Cooke said. “We are working on standardizing their payment because many of them have families to care for.”

Abbas is originally from Iraq but was displaced to Syria, then to Turkey, and now lives New Haven, Connecticut with her family. It was her Baklava that everyone in New Haven fell in love with. Co Founder Caterina Passoni, Yale ‘18, was a cultural companion with Abbas and her family. Every time she visited their home she “got fed these fantastically, delicious filling meals.”

That is where the idea sparked.

Passoni got together with Weiss and started to sell Abbas’s baklava at butteries. Within a month, they doubled their revenue. By the end of Spring they won the Tsai City Summer Fellowship, “a startup incubator on campus that awards entrepreneurial teams with a fifteen thousand dollar grant to further develop their organization over the summer.”

“It was crazy how quickly we were embraced by the community gustatorily, in terms how excited they were about the food, and programmatically with that kind of support,” Weiss said.

There are around 20 students who work for Havenly Treats all of whom volunteer their time and skill sets. There are currently five teams, Operations, Finance, Business Development, Media and Marketing, and Legal, with two coordinators in each team.

“We wrote code to automate the processing of customer orders as well as invoicing,” Vanessa Yan, coordinator of the Finance Team said. “We are currently creating an Inventory Management system that tracks the expected and actual usage of ingredients as well as   any waste of ingredients.”

Passoni graduated from Yale last year and is working for Havenly Treats to expand the organization.

“In addition to thinking about if we have enough walnuts to produce the Baklava this weekend,” Weiss said, “we also think about the future of Havenly Treats. Where do we want to be in five years from now?”

First and foremost, Havenly Treats hopes to develop its fellowship program to reach out to more female refugees. Cooke said that they are experimenting with some new food products in addition to Baklava and hoping to obtain some large scale partners. The long term goal, however, is to have this model replicated on other university campuses and major cities.

“We believe that students are uniquely positioned in order to have an impact on refugee, specifically female refugee unemployment, and as such have a responsibility to act,” Weiss said.