Programs | The Cookie Cart

Baking Bright Futures at Cookie Cart

You might be familiar with Cookie Cart’s delicious cookies, but Cookie Cart is so much more than just a bakery, it is an employment and training program located in North Minneapolis that provides teens with lasting and meaningful work, life and leadership skills. Through a combination of hands-on work experience, classroom job skills training, formal customer service education, skills certification and financial literacy, young people gain the tools they need to become successful, self-reliant adults. Here are our programs:

Bakery Program

The Bakery Program offers a first, paid job experience for North Minneapolis youth ages 15-17. The program provides a creative teaching environment in which young people learn basic employment skills such as:

appropriate workplace behavior
problem solving
teamwork
time management
taking direction
seeing tasks through to completion

Customer Service

Cookie Cart's customer service training provides participants the skills and knowledge necessary to present a positive image in both their personal and professional lives. Interpersonal communication skill development are at the heart of this program.

360 Degrees

360 is a classroom based program which teaches comprehensive workforce readiness skills such as resume writing, interview preparation, and job searching. The primary objective of the class is to prepare participants to find and keep jobs in the traditional workforce.

National Career Readiness Certification

This assessment prepared by the ACT corporation measures job skills essential to success in a variety of occupations. Cookie Cart youth are supported through the certification process through enhanced training and test preparation.

Click here to learn more about the Cookie Cart experience from our youth employees.

To learn more about the success of our programs, read the Wilder Research program evaluation summary report.