Niomi Jones, culinary director at Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church and owner of Grand Empire catering, stands inside the kitchen at the church on March 5, 2025. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
The smell of pan-seared salmon topped with a creamy garlic sauce that Chef Niomi Jones placed on a bed of wild rice filled the halls of Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church in Atlanta one morning in March.
“Cooking is a way that people connect,” Jones said while chopping vegetables. “From every walk of life, every religion, we break bread and we connect with one another over food.”
Chef Niomi Jones pours a creamy garlic sauce over wild rice and asparagus for a church event in Atlanta on March 5, 2025. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Jones is the culinary director at the church, but she also owns and operates Grand Empire — a catering business she started after getting a degree in culinary arts and graduating from the Gwinnett County Public Library’s New Start Entrepreneurship Incubator program in 2022.
“My first opportunity to work for someone outside of the program was [Georgia] Sen. Donzella James,” Jones said. “I did her wedding, and it was a snowball effect after that.”
The program supports a growing but largely overlooked subset of aspirational entrepreneurs, like Jones, who struggled to find work and care for her three young kids following a brief prison sentence despite years of experience working in the restaurant industry.
“Once the background checks came back, it was like, ‘Yeah, sorry. Maybe in another 10 years, but right now no.’ And I was just really pressed on what else can I do?”
So, when she came across New Start while browsing the internet one day, Jones said she didn’t hesitate to apply with only 11 minutes left before the deadline. A week later, she got a phone call for an interview and was accepted.
“There’s so many barriers and stigma for formerly incarcerated people. So just to see them come to the program with those ideas and then turn their ideas into reality and an actual business is very rewarding.”
Adam Pitts, New Start project manager
“This has hands down been the best experience that I could’ve ever had with an educational program teaching me about business, leadership, marketing strategies,” Jones said. “College teaches you theory. This was both theory and practical.”
Completing the six-month course while trying to rebuild her life wasn’t easy, but it was worth it, Jones said. She’s since hired 15 people, including some who also served time behind bars, to work for her as dishwashers, waiters and sous chefs.
“In the next five years, I want to escalate into event planning, because even though I love cooking, this is hard on your body, and it’s not something I’m going to do when I’m 80 years old,” Jones said. “Next month will be the first time I teach a cooking class. So I want to be able to start teaching and doing consulting.”
Jones is also paying it forward by returning to the program as a mentor for a new cohort of about a dozen formerly incarcerated people, who are learning how to build a limited liability company, record podcasts and choose a name for a business.
For the thousands of Georgians who return home from prison each year, being their own boss isn’t just a career choice. Sometimes it’s the only choice, and New Start project manager Adam Pitts said the Gwinnett County Public Library is proving to be a key tool to help them get started.
Adam Pitts is project manager of the Gwinnett County Public Library’s New Start Entrepreneurship program for formerly incarcerated people. (Chamian Cruz/WABE)
“Libraries [are] a community hub,” Pitts said.
He explained how the program continues to run on grants after initially being awarded $120,000 from Google and the American Library Association in 2020.
“The students attend monthly meetings at our Duluth branch, where they hear from a local business expert on a monthly topic, and then there is an online curriculum they complete in between those classes,” Pitts said.
In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which will affect programs that serve public libraries across Georgia.
“This has hands down been the best experience that I could’ve ever had with an educational program teaching me about business, leadership, marketing strategies. College teaches you theory. This was both theory and practical.”
Chef Niomi Jones, owner of Grand Empire catering company
A spokesperson for the Gwinnett County Public Library said there’s no immediate impact to New Start, but the long-term effect of those changes “will be in shrinking the pool of potential future funders.”
“In many cases,” Pitts said, “this is really the only avenue for success in life for them, you know, there’s so many barriers and stigma for formerly incarcerated people. … So just to see them come to the program with those ideas and then turn their ideas into reality and an actual business is very rewarding.”
More than 13,000 people were released from Georgia prisons in 2024 alone, according to the state’s corrections department. That’s 13,000 people who could face barriers to housing, employment and credit.
And as the second most populous county, Gwinnett has a high population of citizens who have been incarcerated or on probation or parole. According to the library system, 60% of this population is Black or Latino.
Dewy Ventura, another New Start graduate, said the program taught him how to organize and then grow his mixed martial arts entertainment company called CholoMMA, and that without it, he would probably still be recording videos in his backyard, not knowing how to get it off the ground.
“What the program did for me was it freed me up to do the things that God put in my heart to do,” Ventura said. “And then also to have a plan to execute these things, you know, because sometimes we want to do things but we don’t know how to go about doing it.”
Dewy Ventura, right, practices a move with Professor Maajid Al-Kush, left, at Team Mongoose Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Norcross. (Chamian Cruz/WABE)
At the end of the program, Ventura won second place in a Shark Tank-style competition for funding for his company. He said he’s grateful to his wife, who frequents the library, pushed him to participate.
“She’s really proud of me,” Ventura said. “Just the fact that I stuck with something and went to the training, did the lessons, actually showed up, you know? … It’s life-changing. It really is.”
Ventura is now a mentor in the program, and the library continues to offer laptops, hotspots, 3D printers and various other resources he and others can borrow if they ever want to take their businesses even further.
