On late July weekends in London, the public parks see a rush of visitors.

Some jog through garden paths. Others lay out blankets to sunbathe and picnic. They arrive, riding bikes and walking from the nearest tube stations, to take advantage of rare sunny days in the capital.

Many are there to do their shopping at the local farmer’s market. They dodge dogs and sidestep strollers to purchase everything from local produce to freshly fermented kimchi.

If you find yourself in town on a day like that—at Victoria Park, perhaps, a manicured oasis known as “the people’s park”—follow your nose to a white tent stacked high with baguettes, boules, and croissants.

There, under bright orange pennant flags, you’ll find London’s newest residents selling some of the city’s finest bread.

They are “Breadwinners,” refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom eager to build a life in their new home.

As beneficiaries of a nonprofit organization by the same name, these young adults are practicing their English and gaining valuable work experience that’s hard to come by. Each loaf they sell is a step towards another job, a university degree, a career, and a life in London.

At Breadwinners, there is no prescribed recipe for success. There is only a short list of carefully considered interventions and plenty of time for them to work their magic.

Asylum seekers arriving in the UK face a sociopolitical landscape full of mixed signals.

On paper, the support provided by the British government is generous. Under the United Nations’ 1915 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, refugees are entitled to certain legal protections, rights, and assistance. In the UK, asylum seekers are guaranteed housing and a cash allowance of £49.18 a week (in dollars that’s roughly $9.00 a day) for each household member.

However, they cannot choose where they live and cannot work while awaiting approval of their asylum application. During that time, the Home Office—the UK ministry responsible for immigration—might place them in central London or a small rural town.

Outside of a few specialized programs for refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan, the application process is known to drag on. It can take weeks, months, or years. As of April 14, 2024, the UK government had a backlog of 83,154 asylum applications.

The political environment adds more complexity. As in other parts of Western Europe and the United States, conservative leaders and activists play to their base by stoking fear and promoting legislation that limits the arrival of refugees and immigrants.

In 2023, Rishi Sunak, then the Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, led the adoption of the Illegal Migration Act, which removed the ability of anyone who arrived in the UK by small boat crossing to apply for asylum. The Labour Party’s successful election in July 2024 effectively ended this legislation, but its influence on public discourse remains strong.

In late July—when the BitterSweet story team visited Breadwinners—three young girls were killed by an attacker in the coastal city of Southport. Far-right social media posts seized on the moment to spread misinformation that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived in the country on a small boat. (He was, in fact, born in Wales.) Violent riots ensued, although they were quickly met by thousands of counter-protesters decrying the hatred and chanting, “Refugees are welcome here.”

“Imagine if you're told right now you need to get a job within a couple of weeks,” Martin says. “It's practically impossible if you haven't done anything for the last year because of all the time it took until you got the right to work.”

The challenge is further exacerbated for young refugees who might lack formal work experience, let alone work experience in the UK.

Martin is an immigrant, too, and he recalls struggling to find work as an industrial engineer when he first arrived from Argentina via Spain. He explains that it’s all about connections; it's hard to get your first job if you don’t know anyone in the country.

That’s where Breadwinners steps in.

Five miles north of Victoria Park, in the bustling town of Walthamstow, Abdullah arrives at Lloyd Park on a recent Saturday morning at 9 am sharp to set up the Breadwinners booth.

In a prime corner spot, between a vegan patisserie and a Spanish deli, he unfolds tables and raises the canopy. Then he throws a white apron over his tan t-shirt and light-wash denim and begins setting out the bread, carefully aligning it along the edge for maximum visibility.

Abdullah moves with the sure speed of a seasoned proprietor, his eyes flitting ahead to the next task while his hands finish the current one.

The market doesn’t open until 10, but as Abdullah is still finishing his checklist, three customers arrive early to purchase their favorite loaves. He quickly pivots with a greeting to take their orders before returning to his rhythm.

After the official opening, a regular asks about a sourdough she tried a few weeks ago. Abdullah patiently walks her through the various options until she finds what she wants.

Over the next few hours, foot traffic ebbs and flows. Loyalty cards exchange hands. Pastries are bagged up and handed to hungry toddlers and their grateful parents.

When time and interest allow, Abdullah and Martha—a Breadwinners staff member and Abdullah’s colleague for the day—explain their social mission and business model to customers. (“It’s an employability scheme for refugees.” “We partner with a local bakery to source our sourdough.”)

For Abdullah, the social mission is personal. A refugee from Sudan, he first sought asylum in the UK in 2021. He didn’t speak English then, and his housing situation was up to the whims of the government. “It was a difficult time,” he recalls.

Abdullah was moved between hotels, flats, and house shares while awaiting a decision on his asylum claim. When he secured approval and earned the right to work in the UK, Breadwinners was his first paid job.

These market days, spent conversing with customers and selling bread, count among his favorite pastimes.

Abdullah joined the organization through a chance encounter with a Breadwinners program manager in Northwest London. Ready to practice his English and engage with locals, he immediately applied and started his first role as a “Riser,” shadowing experienced team members as a part-time volunteer.

When the government granted Abdullah’s right to work, he moved on to the flagship Breadwinners program, running his own market stall as a paid employee. He recently graduated and is transitioning to a third program, “Proofers,” to develop customer service, sales, and IT skills.

“Since I joined Breadwinners, I gained so much experience,” Abdullah says. “When I started as a market store manager it was so helpful to improve my English.”

He loves meeting new people: customers, coworkers, and neighbors. He’ll have a conversation with anyone who spares the time.

After his time with Breadwinners, Abdullah plans to pursue a career in human rights. He remembers humanitarian organizations supporting his community in Sudan and wants to pay it forward.

“Since then, I said, ‘I will work with organizations to help people when I grow up,’” Abdullah explains. “I couldn't imagine coming to the UK. But I just finally came to the UK and started studying and started helping people.”

As he moves closer to his dream, Abdullah says he’ll miss the daily interactions with other Risers and Breadwinners. In the meantime, he’s soaking up this final opportunity to share bread with fellow Londoners on a sunny day.

Val and Bill are two such market-goers who have lived in Walthamstow for 40 years. They used to buy sourdough loaves, but recently, focaccia became their carbohydrate of choice.

Val says she appreciates the friendliness of the Breadwinners staff she meets, although she acknowledges some language barriers.

“They often don’t speak a lot of English,” she says. “There’s usually a couple of people, and sometimes one of them is not very familiar with the way it works.”

Patrick and Willa are another couple living near the park's northern edge. They’ve been loyal weekly shoppers at the market since it opened in 2019.

“It's really transformed the experience of living here,” Willa says. “There wasn't this sense of community, and food was a real issue. You just couldn't get healthy food around here.”

Willa used to work in the refugee sector and is acutely frustrated with what she sees as government systems that undermine the ability of asylum seekers to find stability.

“The problem in Europe is that refugees, when they come, they often have no way of working,” she explains. “It’s a tragedy because these people have skills and so much motivation to start doing stuff and be in a community, because they lost their community. So what more could you wish for?”

She’s encouraged by organizations like Breadwinners that create economic and social opportunities for recent arrivals. That, along with her appreciation for artisan bread, keeps her coming back to this tent week after week.

Breadwinners' current strategy results from a decade spent navigating the web of laws and bureaucracy that govern refugees.

Its offerings include the Risers, Breadwinners, and Proofers programs—the three experiences Abdullah progressed through over the last year.

Risers are young people actively seeking asylum between the ages of 16 and 24. They are unable to work, but they are legally allowed to volunteer. Breadwinners invites them to local markets for two-hour shifts each weekend for two months, joined by a mentor, to practice customer service and sales. The organization pays for transportation and food to make it as easy as possible to attend.

Josie Kyan is the program manager in charge of Risers (she’s also the staff member who met and recruited Abdullah). After an early career in film production, Josie sought a new path that aligned with her interests in humanitarian aid. A few years ago she ended up in Calais, in Northern France, volunteering alongside refugees and displaced communities.

“I was like, ‘I can't believe people don't really know about this, and I can't believe how people are being treated,’” she recalls.

In Calais, she focused on meeting individuals’ fundamental needs: shelter, food, and safety. Upon her return to the UK, she hoped to support refugees as they addressed higher-level needs like community, purpose, and self-actualization. Now, she helps about 80 Risers each year do just that.

After Risers, the flagship Breadwinners program is the next step for young people who receive the right to work and are looking for their first job in the country.

They’re paid a UK living wage to spend six months as managers of their own market stall in London or Brighton. With anywhere from 11 to 15 active markets at a time, Breadwinners employs about 30 refugees each year.

“We are all about giving people their first experience and helping to build that CV for people that are struggling to get on the employment ladder,” explains Martha Solloway, the program manager, “because so many jobs expect you to have had some sort of work experience before.”

Like Josie, Martha traces her passion for refugee rights back to Calais. Around 2015, she visited the city to volunteer. Later, her family decided to foster an asylum seeker from Somalia named Mustafe (“Muste”), who was an unaccompanied minor.

Martha watched Muste struggle in their rural Dorset community and the English education system. His experience challenged Martha’s understanding of the refugee experience. She saw that the UK wasn’t a perfect haven at the end of a harrowing journey.

“I thought about the journey a lot, but I hadn't really considered the actual experience once you reached the UK,” she remembers. “Once you’re here it’s not easy either.”

When Risers and Breadwinners complete their respective programs, they can apply to become Proofers. This experience, first crafted during the COVID-19 pandemic, involves working remotely under the supervision of program manager Hussam Alsamman to sell bread to wholesale customers across the city, including restaurants and cafes. Proofer graduates use these customer service and IT skills to unlock new career opportunities.

It’s a tight-knit, hardworking group, welcoming a new cohort of about four Proofers every six months.

Hussam is a refugee from Syria who worked for multinational corporations, including GAP and Marks & Spencer, for more than two decades. When he arrived in the UK in 2017, despite an expedited asylum approval process and global experience with a British company, he was at an impasse—unable to find an office job matching his merchandising and planning expertise.

Working at Breadwinners was the first professional opportunity Hussam landed after a three-year job search.

As he trains his team of young refugees to conduct sales calls and design Excel formulas, he hopes to help them avoid the employment obstacles he had to overcome.

Across all three programs, Breadwinners’ focus on work experience sets it apart from other refugee charities. Staff members provide valuable connections to the UK workforce. They edit CVs, help participants apply for jobs, and serve as local references for potential employers.

When it’s time for a Riser, Breadwinner, or Proofer to move on, the whole organization celebrates. It’s a sign that the model is working.

“It's both a happy and sad situation when people graduate,” Martin says, “but we know that we want them to do much more than selling bread.”

Josie encourages her cohorts of Risers to sign up for at least three opportunities before they leave—such as job openings, volunteer opportunities, and university programs—so they can keep the momentum going.

“We see ourselves as a springboard,” she says. “No one can really stay with us forever.”

If you ask John Lister—founder of both Shipton Mill and Celtic Bakers and chair of Breadwinners’ board of trustees—about his passion for bread, prepare for an extended, thoughtful response.

In the early '80s, he was part of an artisan movement gaining momentum in London and beyond.

"We really wanted to get something that was gritty and really understand it," John recalls. This pursuit led him and a handful of collaborators from diverse backgrounds—John himself a trained anthropologist—to the ancient and elemental art of milling flour and baking bread.

"It's flour, salt, time, and yeast in some cases," he explains with reverence. "Those ingredients have been the basics of bread making for 3,000 years."

The human connection to baking, shared across centuries and continents, remains a constant focus for John throughout his ventures. After all, bread presents a choice, at once philosophical and practical: It can be baked quickly, with cheap ingredients, for an average result, or it can be baked carefully, with the best ingredients, to attract the attention of eager dinner guests the minute it’s placed on the table.

At the Celtic Bakers facility in an industrial pocket of Tottenham, dozens of bakers rush around the room, balancing urgency and precision to produce more than 1,500 loaves per hour on a 24/7 schedule. Mixing, proofing, scoring. They could automate each step, but Celtic Bakers prefers the hands-on approach that cemented its reputation as one of the best bakeries in the UK.

Celtic Bakers sells private-label goods at top-shelf grocers like Whole Foods and Waitrose across the UK. It also sells products through Breadwinners.

In fact, the original idea for Breadwinners began here back in 2015. Marika Wilkinson, Breadwinners’ founder, worked with John, Celtic Bakers, and its sister organization, Shipton Mill, to brainstorm ways to support people struggling with employment.

“We were looking for opportunities for engaging with all sorts of people,” John remembers, “just to see how we could start them out on their life’s journey, through bread.”

In its original form, Breadwinners took place on two wheels. Individuals started small bicycle businesses to sell and deliver bread all around London. While bike delivery offered a promising route to financial security, it remained a largely solo enterprise.

On the other hand, markets brought together all the essential ingredients people needed to thrive in an unfamiliar city. By the time Martin took over as managing director in 2017, Breadwinners was ready to focus full-time on hiring refugees to work at local markets.

“I really liked the community aspect of the markets,” he remembers, “and I knew that people could practice their English, customer service, a bit of marketing, a bit of finance skills.”

Martin points out that Celtic Bakers doesn’t donate its bread to Breadwinners. For the weekly markets, Breadwinners places orders at cost. For wholesale orders, Celtic Bakers offers a significant discount but still earns a small profit for each purchase. In Martin’s view, that keeps the operation sustainable and makes the model replicable; he would be thrilled if other businesses launched a similar program for refugees.

Every weekend, as unassuming white boxes are loaded into cargo vans and dropped at parks across the city, Celtic Bakers’ bread provides common ground in a country that isn’t always welcoming to outsiders.

“You see every day and the tragedy of people arriving and being greeted with fear, with concern,” John observes, although he thinks the UK’s history should challenge this narrative. "Britain is a country of migrants. People have been coming to this island for thousands of years from all directions."

At the market, each purchase facilitates a conversation that helps customers and community members rethink their assumptions.

“Bread as a medium is this extraordinary thing that we all share and we all have a great love for,” John notes. “And it’s so central to family life that it acts as this wonderful, cohesive bond between us all.”

The young people in Breadwinners aren’t bakers, but they’re engaged in a process that demands just as much care and patience. They’re settling into a new country, learning a new language, developing new skill sets, and building new communities.

As I asked them about their favorite breads throughout our conversations, I watched their eyes light up.

Abdullah thinks focaccia is the perfect pairing for a bowl of lamb soup.

Emad, Abdullah’s colleague in the Proofers program, prefers ciabatta. It reminds him of bread back home in Eritrea.

Abdi, a young man from Somalia, arrived in the UK via Morocco in August 2023. He heard about Breadwinners from a fellow asylum seeker and applied to become a Riser in February 2024.

“I was so excited for customer service,” he says. “To get experience, get confidence, and learn about bread.”

For the first few weeks, he shadowed market managers in the Breadwinners program and practiced how to talk to customers. He also began meeting with his mentor, Andreas.

Andreas stood by Abdi in the Breadwinners booth, offering advice and prompting Abdi to speak to customers. Abdi was shy, but Andreas quickly found that giving him challenges helped him break out of his shell. (“Explain Breadwinners to every customer you meet.” “Ask each customer today if they want a loyalty card.”)

After each shift, they hung out at the park, chatted at a nearby cafe, or shared a meal at a nearby restaurant. During one recent meeting, Abdi introduced Andreas to Somali food for the first time.

Andreas is a born-and-raised Londoner who recently left his finance career to explore social sector opportunities. This is his first time mentoring a young asylum seeker, and he describes the experience as a unique blend of friendship, cultural immersion, and career guidance.

“The easy part was creating a friendship, creating a bond,” he says.

Abdi and Andreas love the English Premier League, and the latest news from Crystal Palace and Chelsea dominated their early discussions.

Then, the conversations turned to bigger topics. Abdi dreams of becoming a professional footballer. He’s also interested in a career in computer programming, and he needs help practicing his English skills. Andreas spends a lot of time thinking about how to advance each goal.

“It's not as easy as being like, ‘Okay, let's find you an internship,’” he says. “You've got to really start from the lower levels, build up the confidence.”

Abdi texts Andreas with daily challenges, from navigating housing issues to understanding British phrases and slang. Andreas does his best to guide him each step of the way. (One recent piece of wisdom: “You can’t just call anyone ‘babe.’ That’s for a special someone in your life.”)

To guide the mentoring process, Breadwinners provides each pair with a tool called the “Development Star.” They use it to help mentees prioritize goals based on five categories: making a difference in your community, reaching your goals, well-being and happiness, work and training, and communication.

Abdi recently completed his initial term in the Risers program and hopes to move on to the Breadwinners program when a spot opens on the waitlist. He’s convinced he’ll thrive in this new role.

“You don't have confidence when you start, but when you finish you have more confidence,” Abdi says. To him, the recipe for success is simple: “You need to go talk to people and improve your skills and become interested in the culture.”

On the day I visited Victoria Park, Mohammed, a Riser who recently arrived in the UK from Sudan, met with Lucio, his mentor, for the first time. They joined a group of other Risers and mentors as Martin welcomed them to the market.

In a circle, Martin invited each mentor and Riser to share their name, their dream job, and how many languages they speak. They learned how to avoid cross-contamination and how to accommodate customer allergies. They took turns pretending to sell bread to each other.

Throughout the morning, between simulated transactions, Lucio and Mohammed warmed up to each other, first in halting sentences and then with smiles and laughs.

“I’m very excited because I haven’t been volunteering,” Mohammed said. “This is the first time for me.”

He wants to gain work experience, learn how to write a CV, and prepare for a successful career in the UK. He responds quickly and confidently when asked about his goals: “Yeah, I would like to do electrical engineering.”

When I asked Martha to quantify the impact of Breadwinners’ work, she told me about a recent conversation with a graduate of the Risers program.

When prompted for feedback about her experience with the organization, the young woman didn’t discuss her customer service skills or language abilities. Instead, she recalled visiting a restaurant with her mentor. She had just arrived in the UK and didn’t know how to order in a British restaurant, but her mentor patiently walked her through the process until she felt comfortable and confident enough to order on her own.

Stories like these indicate that Breadwinners is operating beyond the scope of a typical employment nonprofit. The organization provides jobs and launches careers, but it’s also engaged in more ambitious work: ensuring every young refugee feels at home.

“Breadwinners absolutely helps us to move forward,” Abdullah says. He can’t wait to leverage his newfound confidence and connections to make his dreams of a humanitarian career a reality. He has already volunteered with food banks, local charities for young adults, and the British Red Cross. Next, he plans to perfect his English and attend university.

Abdi, for his part, is no longer intimidated by his new city. He describes London as “amazing” and “beautiful.” In May, he joined a community 5K race in Hackney. He also expects to remain close to his mentor, Andreas, and maybe even attend football matches together.

“Breadwinners,” he explains, “is our family.”