The Dog Tag Bakery under construction (photo courtesy of Dog Tag Bakery)
On a side street in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, a bakery is under construction, preparing to join the upscale area’s cafes and restaurants.
This bakery, however, will offer more than croissants and muffins. With every purchase, customers will support a group of nine wounded veterans, who will work at the bakery while studying business and entrepreneurship to transition back into civilian society.
The Dog Tag Bakery, set to open this fall, provides these veterans — who come from almost every military service and have suffered a variety of physical injuries and mental trauma — with business experience and a certificate from Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, earned through classes like “Principles of Management” and “Business Policy and Strategy.”
“It’s 100% about our mission. The business is secondary,” says Dog Tag’s general manager, Justin Ford, an Army veteran of Iraq and Kosovo.
The project is the brainchild of Fr. Richard Curry, S.J., a Jesuit priest and adjunct professor of Catholic studies at Georgetown. He first ran a bakery at the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped in Maine, and found that the business provided an ideal model for disabled people to interact with the community while offering a service.
“Nobody goes to a bakery to be sad. They go to a bakery to be happy,” Curry says. “I wanted to place disabled veterans in a very happy situation in the public.”
Through Curry’s time working with the handicapped in Maine, he began working with veterans, and through his connections to Georgetown, developed the work-study partnership.
Dog Tag’s fellows are paid a $2,200 a month stipend over their six months with the program — and the business covers all costs of the certificate.
“Everyone thinks it’s a good idea to hire veterans, but no one ever thinks of hiring disabled veterans, and I wanted to prove them wrong,” Curry says.
The first class of fellows joined the bakery in June, working on opening a business rather than just running one.
“The next classes won’t get that type of experience,” says Maurice Jones, a 22-year Army veteran and sergeant major who has been deployed to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. “They may get a little project — ‘we want you to open a business’ — but we’re actually doing it, not simulating.”
Maurice Jones, a 22-year Army veteran and fellow in Dog Tag’s inaugural class of wounded veterans, outside the site in Georgetown that will house Dog Tag Bakery. (Photo: Emma Hinchliffe)
Dog Tag is among many programs nationwide — including Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families and employment program Hire a Hero — that help veterans gain education or work experience, but it is unique in combining the two, Ford says.
The business is a “for-profit nonprofit” where all profits from the bakery go back into stipends for the veterans involved and their Georgetown courses.
The nine fellows in the inaugural class will finish in December, and many are interested in continuing in the business world. Jones hopes to eventually open his own IT business, which was his specialty in the military.
“I have leadership, but I don’t have civilian-type business leadership,” Jones says. “This class focuses me on learning the different ways of thinking, motivating, instructing and actually interacting with civilians or my employees when I start my own small business.”
