Beckley Common Council plans lease agreement for Fruits of Labor, Seed Sower, amidst allegations from a former server

BECKLEY, WV (WVNS) — Beckley Common Council is poised to work with local real estate brokers in order to set terms of a lease agreement on a building owned by the City of Beckley.

Fruits of Labor Cafe, a business, and Seed Sower, a non-profit residential program for women recovering from substance use disorder, are currently operating in the Neville Street business without a lease agreement. According to Beckley Common Council members and Mayor Rob Rappold, they do not pay rent.

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At-Large Councilman Cody Reedy pushed for Council to begin hammering out a lease agreement during the regular meeting of Council on Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Reedy said he has questions about how the Fruits of Labor Cafe and the Seed Sower residential home operates.

He said tax filings show Seed Sower had more than one million dollars in assets in 2022, with more than $11,000 in rental income listed and over $100,000 paid to a spouse for a Seed Sower board member for construction work.

“I mean, if they have a total of $1.4 million in assets, that’s doing a lot better than any business I’m involved in, and we pay all of our B&O tax, we pay our mortgages, we pay our rent,” Councilman Reedy said after the meeting. “So it’s only fair to them that they do the same.”

Fruits of Labor Cafe, owned by Tammy Jordan, began operating from the city’s building in September 2022 and quickly became a popular neighborhood bakery. Jordan had intended in 2013 to launch Seed Sower, according to current Seed Sower Director and President James “Jay” Phillips.

Instead, Phillips left a job with the federal government and launched Seed Sower as a residential recovery program for women in 2020, adapting the Recover Kentucky model, which Phillips said focuses on peer-led recovery, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and is a non-clinical program.

“Residents are tasked with holding themselves and each other accountable for actions and behaviors that can pose a risk to their recovery, or the health of the home itself,” said Phillips.

“There are four different levels of care for recovery residences that provide an array of different services and recovery supports. Residents are linked to community-based clinical/medical services, like therapists, psychiatrists, primary care, etc., but the houses are intentionally designed to be non-clinical.”

Phillips worked with the Fletcher Group, a non-profit founded by a former Kentucky governor, to develop Seed Sower, according to information provided on The Fletcher Group’s website.

By 2022, IRS documents show, Seed Sower had nearly $1.2 million in net assets and had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Fruits of Labor Cafe, meanwhile, has a nationally acclaimed program which hires women in recovery and trains them for culinary work.  The program has a success rate of over 90 percent, according to various reports.

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As part of the Seed Sower program, women are required to enroll in the Fruits of Labor culinary program, which offers a culinary certificate after around six months of training. Many of the women who enter the Seed Sower program are under a court order and enter a drug treatment program to regain custody of their children or to avoid returning to jail.

Earlier this month, Rose Campbell-Regalado, of Mount Hope, told 59News a Fayette County judge had ordered her to leave Seed Sower last year, after her court-appointed caseworkers had made the request for her.

Campbell-Regalado said she entered the Seed Sower program and lived in a house with other women in recovery. She said her goal was to recover and to meet Child Protective Services {CPS} requirements for keeping her family unified.

However, the strict work schedule required in order to complete the program overwhelmed her, she said.

“I missed a lot of appointments with therapy, marriage counseling, those were court ordered. It was really hectic. I felt, I  I was just overwhelmed a lot. But then on top of that, it was constantly having to work, to not have a paycheck.”

She said residents at Seed Sower were driven in a bus every weekday from the Dawson area of Greenbrier County to Fruits of Labor Cafe in Beckley, where they worked from 7:30 or 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.

WorkForce West Virginia paid the salaries of the Seed Sower workers, except on Mondays, said Campbell-Regalado, which was a “training day,” and the workers received no pay.

“(Phillips) says, ‘Yeah, it’s a good program, you get a culinary certificate, like, you can take it to school, culinary school, get to do all this stuff,'” she recalled her initial conversation with Phillips, which led her to join the program. “I never did that. I only got to wash dishes.”

She alleged lunch breaks were often used as meeting time between the chefs and Seed Sower workers.

Although she completed the Fruits of Labor culinary training and has a certificate, Campbell-Regalado claimed the program failed to provide her with the skills necessary for a better job in the culinary field, as she had believed it would do.

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“It was, literally, restaurant work. Nothing. I can’t tell you what au jus sauce is. I can’t even tell you how to make a ham, and I should’ve known all that, working there,” she said. “But it was restaurant work. That’s all it was.”

She said workers who complete the culinary training program with WorkForce WV are typically invited to continue working at Fruits of Labor Cafe, with another state grant program paying their $10-an-hour salaries.

She said servers are not permitted to keep tips, which supportive customers often leave in order to encourage the servers, most of whom are rebuilding their lives.

She showed screenshots which seem to show a photo of a pay slip with over $100 in tips listed for Campbell-Regalado, and a man she identified as a Fruits of Labor supervisor texting her that the slip was a mistake and that she would not receive tips.

Campbell-Regalado said the peer recovery model at Seed Sower consisted of other women at the house, who are in recovery and are not licensed in therapy, “voting” others in Seed Sowers “up” or “down” a “phase.”

She said the phases have to be completed in order to successfully finish the program, and, although the program was advertised to her as lasting around six months, completing Seed Sower could take more than a year.

Campbell-Regalado said she petitioned her court-appointed caseworkers to help her leave Seed Sower when she learned Phillips wanted her to be sentenced into the Seed Sower program, which would mean a longer stay at Seed Sower.

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She said she had no money when she left Seed Sower’s residential program and that she paid $1,000 to Seed Sower for boarding costs.

Campbell-Regalado researched non-profit IRS filings for Seed Sower and made the documents available to Beckley Common Council members.

She said she shared the story of her recovery journey with Seed Sower, and she alleged that Fruits of Labor Cafe used it as advertising in order to “sell” the Seed Sower program during media and networking events.

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