News

December 6, 2023

For the first time since the pandemic, the FareStart Café located at Pacific Tower is open and serving coffee, tea, freshly made pastries and sandwiches. The café is also home to FareStart’s Barista & Customer Service Program.

The eagerly

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December 5, 2023

Chef Wayne Johnson (he/him) is retiring at the end of the year after a high profile and extremely successful career in the culinary industry. But despite his many professional accomplishments, the thing that makes him the proudest is the community that he’s helped build. A community of fellow chefs, students, farmers,

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July 24, 2023

We sat down with FareStart’s new leader after five weeks on the job, to learn a little more about him, what wisdom he’s drawn from his life and work experiences, and what excites him about FareStart right now.

Tell us a bit about your background.

I was born in New York but grew up in Seattle, the youngest of 10 children. I feel deeply connected to the experience of growing up in a large family and what that taught me. I learned a lot about how to navigate, how

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June 22, 2023

Did you know that FareStart is more than a nonprofit organization? We’re a nonprofit social enterprise that’s focused on job training and employment. This means that we run social enterprise businesses to generate revenue for our mission and to train people with barriers to employment.

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May 23, 2023

Youth and young adults ages 15 ½-24 in our Barista & Customer Service Program Job Readiness Pathway have returned to in-person training, three years after the COVID pandemic forced a shift to online-only

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May 16, 2023

Please join us in welcoming longtime executive nonprofit leader Patrick D’Amelio (he/him) as our new Chief Executive Officer.

Patrick brings nearly 30 years of nonprofit leadership experience to FareStart. His vast experience, skillsets and leadership approach will be an incredible asset in FareStart’

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May 4, 2023

Dear FareStart Community,

Today, we announced that we are scaling back our workforce by 20% and saying goodbye to dedicated members of our team in the process. The majority of impacted staff members were part of our prepared meals team, an area of our work that has been reduced as pandemic-related emergency funding has declined.

This was an extremely difficult decision that we were saddened to make, and one that wouldn’t have been made unless we felt it was absolutely necessary

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December 1, 2022

Dear FareStart Community,

This letter is a bittersweet one to write, as FareStart is such a special place, not only for our students and the greater community but also for me personally.

Today, we shared with staff that I will be stepping down as chief executive officer in January 2023 to take on the chief executive officer role at Gourmondo, a Pacific Northwest food company and FareStart community partner. I will continue to work closely with FareStart, transitioning to the

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October 21, 2022

We talked with Danny Barksdale (he/him), Food Recovery Program Manager, who has been with FareStart for 16 years, about our food recovery work and how it supports food security across Seattle.

So, what is food recovery? Food recovery diverts food from going to waste by collecting unsold, fresh food and upcycling it

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August 25, 2022

July 11, 2022, will go down as a big day in FareStart’s history. After exactly 28 months and eight days without students onsite due to the pandemic, we welcomed back students for in-person training.

It took many months of preparation, but staff was full of joy and excitement when the first seven in-person adult students

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