CLEVELAND — EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute is a grueling six month program, providing ex-offenders with the tools they need for a career in the restaurant industry, and for many, a new life. The program is challenging enough for the former prisoners, but what if they have kids?
"We lose 80%, up to 80% of our students we'll lose who have kids," said EDWINS Founder & CEO Brandon Chrostowski. "So if you're in this program and you have a child, 80% of the time, you're dropping out. Now are you going to come back again? Maybe, but it's not for certain."
The childcare hurdle is something that has always bothered him, and that drove him to come up with the EDWINS Family Center, a free daycare for those enrolled in the EDWINS program.
"Free child care for any student in our program first," Chrostowski said. "Then if we don't hit our capacity, then it's for staff, and then if not, it's for graduates."
Unlike traditional daycares that operate along traditional business hours, this one will work more in line with the industry these students are forging careers in, said the Center's Director and Lead Teacher, Donita Hawthorne.
"We're open Saturdays, we're open evenings, and sometimes we'll be open 'til midnight, one in the morning," she said. "The hours here are mostly going to be based on what the students need."
That pool of potential students, Chrostowski said, is only growing.
"We're now nationwide in prisons. We reach hundreds of thousands of inmates on tablets. The Haslams and the Cleveland Browns will pay for your transportation to get here if you finish that 30-hour program on a tablet," he said. "So it's pretty impressive, now we're getting people from Carolina, Arizona, California. That's why making this helps make those dreams become reality, because someone from far away might say, 'well, I don't have a home,' or 'I don't have someone to watch my kids,' so on and so forth. Now we're bringing it together."
Since opening EDWINS Restaurant on Shaker Square in November of 2013, the Institute has opened a second in EDWINS Too. They also own and operate a butcher shop, bakery and diner on Buckeye. That's also where they have their Second Chance Life Skills Center, which is a campus for additional learning, housing and support services. They also own two apartment buildings that provide housing for some of their students, with an eye towards adding more with the Family Center up and running.
"Childcare was that last real hurdle, but family housing is the biggest and probably the most needed challenge now," Chrostowski said. "The way that everything has been shifting in terms of laws for landlords and tenants, it's harder and harder to get good housing if you have an offense or you're a minority, and most people that we serve have both, so what we need to do is build more family housing, and that's next so hang on."
