Havenly was founded in 2018 by Nieda Abbas, a chef from Iraq, and Caterina Passoni, then a student at Yale. Nieda ran three food businesses in Iraq and has a degree in business management, but in the US, she could barely find a job. With the support of students in the Yale Refugee Project and Sanctuary Kitchen at City Seed, Nieda and Caterina started a bakery that could support refugee women stuck in cycles of poverty. Since then, Havenly has become a non-profit organization dedicated to building community power with refugee and immigrant women through job training, education and organizing.