What Am I Good At?
Birmingham’s WE Inc. Has Been Asking Since 1900.
The Empower Café sits in Avondale and serves breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Operated by Birmingham nonprofit Workshops Empowerment Inc. (WE Inc.), the café is both a working restaurant and a place to learn. The person who seats you may be learning how to seat people. The person taking your order may be finding out this month whether he likes taking orders, which is a separate question from whether he can.
Front of house, interns learn to greet customers, host, take an order, and work a table. In the kitchen they learn prep, baking, sanitation and the dish pit. It’s a working restaurant and a classroom at the same time, and the kitchen belongs to Chef Gary.
“I honestly think [Chef Gary] is one of Birmingham’s hidden culinary gems,” said Adam Burns, director of programs at Workshops Empowerment Inc. “The food is excellent, so customers aren’t simply supporting a mission. They’re enjoying a genuinely great meal while helping create opportunities for people pursuing employment and career development.”
WE Inc. has been working on this since 1900, when mothers of blind children in Birmingham came together because they could see what their kids were capable of and wanted lives that fulfilled it. The organization still runs on that premise 126 years later.
Its newest program, Empower Horizons, includes a lab where participants can try more than 200 different job tasks. The Practical Assessment Exploration System exists so people can answer two questions Burns says many of them have never been given the chance to consider: What am I good at, and what do I want to do? Externships with Grace Klein Community and SOZO Trading Co. put the answers to work outside the building.
Josh came through with the first group. He arrived without much of a work mindset, Burns said, because nobody had ever asked him to picture himself employed. Somewhere in the program he discovered he liked cleaning and facilities work, and he asked for an internship in WE Inc.’s own Environmental Services department. He turned out to be dependable enough that before long he was managing his own task list with almost no supervision. WE Inc. connected him with AbilityOne, and his work ethic got him hired at a federal courthouse in downtown Birmingham.
“He discovered a talent, developed confidence in his abilities, and began to see himself as a professional with something valuable to contribute,” Burns said.
The mission has widened since the days of the founding mothers. WE Inc. still serves people with disabilities, and it now also works with people carrying other barriers to employment, including those who are chronically unemployed, justice-impacted or short on digital literacy. Empower Pathways handles that side with job readiness and soft skills training, internships, job development and help navigating a search that can be brutal for anyone.
Lunch service runs until two. Somebody in that dining room is still deciding what they really want to do. Maybe while you’re eating, you can think about what you actually want to do, too.
Also worth knowing: WE Inc.’s handmade line, WE Made Products, sells at shopwemade.org and makes an easy holiday gift with the proceeds going back into the programs. The organization’s annual fundraiser, the Great Birmingham Bake Off, lands each April at Cahaba Brewing Company, where teams use WE Inc.’s baking mixes to build original desserts for a crowd to sample and judge. Visit their website, weincal.org, for more info.
