Sunday, August 29, 1999

Pizza with a purpose

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Nuns' restaurant serves up job skills, confidence

BY MARK CURNUTTE
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sister Barbara Wheeler, center, is a friend as well as a boss to Kvasio Richardson, left, and Alice Walters at Venice Pizza in University Heights. (Yoni Pozner photo) | ZOOM |

        Two years ago when he started working at Venice Pizza, Kvasio Richardson had no steady work experience, and his math and reading skills were rusty.

        Now he knows how to run a cash register and make food. He has an employment reference and the confidence to pursue training to become an interstate truck driver.

        “I learned that nothing comes for free. You got to work,” Mr. Richardson, 30, said Friday while making pizza and steak hoagies at the University Heights restaurant.

        Venice Pizza isn't just an other neighborhood diner. It's a job training program run by Power Inspires Progress, a West End-based agency that also operates a catering business for the same reason. The agency is one of 19 in the Tristate that receives money from Greater Cincinnati Community Shares.

        The Community Shares federation, which gave $145,000 last year to agencies that don't receive United Way funding, this week will begin its first payroll giving campaign with another large employer — the City of Cincinnati.

        Community Shares donors can stipulate where their gifts go. Power Inspires Progress, founded and still run by two Catholic nuns, is one of the smallest and least known among Community Shares agencies. It received about $3,000 last year from Shares and relies on grants to meet its $90,000 annual budget.

        Since it opened in March 1990, Venice Pizza has worked with 50 low-income employees a year. The agency had planned to help people find work with other employers, but its organizers decided running its own small businesses would better serve people with no real job experience.

        West End Catering, established in 1986, employs six people.

        “Neighborhood people are attracted because we are community based,” said agency co-founder Judy Tensing, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur. “Venice is a corner store. It's an informal, safe environment, one based on personal connections with other neighborhood people.”

        Sister Barbara Wheeler, the agency's other co-founder who, at 74, still manages Venice Pizza, estimates that a quarter of its employees have gone on to find better jobs and stable employment. Workers start at the $5.15 minimum wage. They get pay raises based on dependability and performance.

        “The idea is to help them learn dependability,” said Sister Wheeler, a Dominican Sister of Hope who came from Minneapolis in 1968 as a community-based nurse. “We've had people who could barely read. We've had employees who were on probation. We've had people with disabilities. We've had some people who used to be on welfare.

        “Some get really good jobs after they leave here.”

        What they also get at Venice Pizza is Sister Wheeler's example of hard work and care.

        “The nuns have learned me a lot,” said Mr. Richardson, a 1987 Aiken High School graduate and one of six Venice employees. “Sister Barbara has given me books to work on my reading. She's one of my best friends now.

        “I learned to work hard from Sister Barbara. She works harder than I do sometimes.”

        Mr. Richardson, of Price Hill, recently approached Sister Wheeler about his truck-driving plans.

        “She told me to go for it,” he said. “She said I was ready. I know she believes in me.”

        Alice Walters, 55, is another Venice employee. The Cumminsville mother and grandmother has worked there three years.

        “I used to do janitorial,” she said. “This is better for me.”

        There was a crowd for lunch Friday. Nine people ate in. A man came in for pickup. Sister Wheeler had two large deliveries of hoagies and other sandwiches to make.

        Three men came in to apply for jobs. A help-wanted sign was posted in the storefront window, which is surrounded by bricks painted in red, white and green stripes to mimic the Italian flag.

        Sister Wheeler asked each of the men to come back a second time for an interview. They'll also be asked back a third time before they would be offered a job. The point is to see if they are dependable.

        “We could run this place with two people,” she said later. “But that's not why we're here.”

       

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