Christopher Brennan (left), a baker, and Elizabeth Redford, co-founder and executive director of Tablespoons Bakery and the Next Move Program, worked on making peppermint chip cookies on Thursday. The bakery’s new location in Richmond opened Nov. 10.
Tablespoons Bakery is part of the Next Move Program in which they offer internships and employment to adults with developmental disabilities.
Kelsey Dunn (left), Tablespoons Bakery’s director of education, and Kemani Turton-Jones, a baker, worked in the store Thursday. The bakery was the outgrowth of a baking club that offered training and job skills.
Photos of employees are placed at Tablespoons Bakery in Richmond on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021.
Tablespoons Bakery is part of the Next Move Program in which they offer internships and employment to adults with developmental disabilities.
With an emphatically warm greeting, Kemani Turton-Jones waited patiently behind the counter at Tablespoons Bakery on a recent morning for just a moment before asking: “What would you like to buy exactly?”
He pointed out a few of the day’s specialties: craggy-topped blueberry muffins, icing-filled cinnamon swirl sandwich cookies and a bakery favorite — unicorn cookies, which are festive sprinkled sugar cookies. Christmas music played in the background. During the quiet lulls when there were no customers inside the cheerful space, he’d sing along — and he knew every word.
Tablespoons, at 1707 Westover Hills Blvd., opened Nov. 10 in a former 1930s parsonage house of Westover Hills United Methodist Church. The bakery is part of the Next Move Program, a nearly 10-year-old nonprofit organization that provides job training and internship opportunities for young adults with autism and intellectual disabilities.
The bakery sells a variety of cookies and Ironclad Coffee Roasters coffee during the week — it’s open Tuesday though Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon — though much of its business comes from catering and corporate orders, and the increasingly popular monthly cookie club subscriptions.
Elizabeth Redford, a former Chesterfield County special needs teacher, and her colleague, retired special needs teacher Mary Townley, founded Next Move — and later, Tablespoons. In 2012, both were tapped to create an inclusive job training and internship program for the former Richmond-based Health Diagnostic Laboratory, in which they’d work with special needs high school students to teach them on-the-job training for HDL as part of the students’ high school education.
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