PEABODY — Breaking Grounds Café on Main Street will be changing its hours, most notably by not being open on weekends, beginning Monday, May 23.

Northeast Arc President and CEO Jo Ann Simons relayed that the upcoming weekend closures are part of ensuring that Breaking Grounds adheres to and centers its mission: to provide employment training and job opportunities for intellectually disabled and autistic people.

“The reason for having Breaking Grounds in the first place was (as) a training site for us to train individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism for jobs and food service, and we’ve been doing that for a number of years, very successfully, and have trained dozens of folks who now work at Panera, Amazing Pizza, a lot of different establishments,” Simons said.

She emphasized that the coffee shop’s current employees from Northeast Arc’s supported employment program will not have their training or hours affected as Breaking Grounds shifts to being open only Monday-Friday from 7 a.m.-2 p.m. The shop’s previous hours were Monday-Wednesday from 7 a.m.-2 p.m., Thursday-Friday from 7 a.m.to 4 p.m., and Saturday-Sunday from 8 a.m.to 2 p.m.

“The individuals that we train are only available Monday through Friday, so on Saturday and Sunday, when we’re open, we actually weren’t doing anything related to our mission. And business people weren’t coming because a lot of the people who are attracted to the store are people who are working in the downtown area, people having small meetings there, and they weren’t doing that on the weekends,” Simons explained.

She continued, “We weren’t seeing the volume of sales, and, more importantly, we weren’t being able to activate our mission because if we’re just hiring typical people and running a coffee shop, we’re no different than any other independently owned coffee shop or Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts. What makes us unique and special is that we’re using it as a training environment for people to leave Breaking Grounds, to go on to work somewhere else.”

Simons said the hope initially was that the Peabody community would support Breaking Grounds enough to warrant being open on the weekends, but the numbers argue the opposite: that it’s not financially feasible, nor closely related to Northeast Arc’s mission, to remain open on the weekends.

She stated that the only way she would consider reopening Breaking Grounds on the weekends would be if there is demand from people in the Northeast Arc training program who would like to come in on Saturdays or Sundays, because “then that becomes part of the mission.”