At The Women’s Bakery we take pride in prioritizing the mental, emotional, and physical health of all of our team members. But what does that actually mean? In the recent years, we all have been flooded by messaging around making health and safety the utmost priority in all settings. At The Women’s Bakery, this means continuing some of the things that we have implemented over the years such as providing breakfast porridge to all of the bakers at the start of each shift, arranging period health visits with the Iranzi clinic, or offering monthly mental health counseling services. More importantly, it includes checking in with our team directly and pivoting the norm when it comes to other things.
Between July and August of 2021, Rwanda faced its worst Covid-19 wave to date which involved a government mandated lockdown as well as a set of curfews. Though TWB was deemed an essential business during earlier lockdowns, the most recent landscape forced us to pause operations for more than two weeks, which combined with closures that we internally implemented for everyone to get tested and remain safe, resulted in our bakeries operating for about 15-20 days between two months. This period of uncertainty has been a shared period of languish for communities around the world, and we certainly felt its effect within the TWB family.
Inspired by the acts of global companies shutting its doors for some much needed R&R, The Women’s Bakery is following suit. Between the months of September and October, each of our bakeries will be taking a few days to rest from work and recharge as we finish out the last quarter of 2021. While we know that these breaks are necessary, we know that the break on its own is not enough. We must implement smaller practices in our workday that honor work life balance. As an international organization, this means reimagining what our meeting schedule looks like to make sure we are honoring morning and evenings for all of our team members. It also means making sure that we respect each other’s core working hours and limiting our WhatsApp communications to these specific hours.
Though this is not an exhaustive list of measures we can take to heal through our ever changing reality, it is certainly a step towards changing the way we do business in an equitable way. We recognize that preaching and practicing self-care often requires team-care along the way!
