You make it lighter!
Dear friends
“The coffee business is hard. Refuge makes it harder.”
When someone said this to me last week, I could not find a reason to disagree. (I’m quoting someone who loves and understands us, by the way!) Unless you have a world-domination model, coffee by itself is not a great business plan.
Who starts a business that relies on $5 drink sales? Us.
Who opens their first coffee shop in a community that, while vibrant, has a majority population that is below the national poverty level? Us.
Who hires people before they learn to speak English? Us.
Here’s why what we do is hard:
Coffee. Expensive to buy and make well. Not a high margin product to sell. People spend $5 to sit at one of your tables for hours.
Labor. In the marketplace, the typical labor to profit margin is… let’s just say it is way lower than ours. We do that on purpose, but it makes running a business harder than it needs to be.
Funding. We believe in what we do, but what we do is hard to articulate because we are a hybrid. Unlike many nonprofits, we have a money-making model that means we don’t have to raise 100% of our salaries, program needs, etc. Refuge is not your typical nonprofit that runs only programs.
Excellence. From the beginning, we’ve sought to make our specialty coffee drinks, well, special. So, our training, our equipment, our standards, our products, and our service is far from the run of the mill. We want everyone who works at Refuge to be proud of Refuge.
Story. We are committed to only telling the stories our refugee employees want to tell. Some people are empowered by opportunities to tell their story. Others are empowered by feeling safe that their story will remain only theirs to tell. Sure, stories sell more coffee and garner more donations, but to us it isn’t worth it to break trust or to tell only the sad or dramatic stories.
Chaos. Hung Truong, our Director of Development says, “When I worked in Refuge operations, there was always a fire to be put out. As a young refugee, there was always a fire to put out.” We are familiar with chaos (and sometimes we create it!).
Cross-Culturality. As Leon Shombana says, “The world is here at Refuge Coffee.” It’s beautiful, but the melding of worlds takes intentionality and planning for it to be authentic.
We just thought you’d like to know that we know it’s hard, but selling coffee and extending welcome in this way is our choice anyway.
This work is worth every bit of hard. Because humans are worth every bit of hard.
Also, you know who makes the work lighter? You.
You know who makes the uncertainty of it all more stable? Our Cortado Club members! (This is a group of monthly donors who invest in our job training program and in our mission of welcome. We’d love for you to join us!)
Doing the hard word of welcome with strong coffee and stronger supporters like you!
Kitti
