In Philly, Quaker City Coffee Provides Jobs and Support for Returning Citizens

Some of Quaker City’s stream offerings. All images pleasantness of Quaker City Coffee.

For anyone who has spent time behind bars, a lapse to life on a outward offers dual measureless challenges. First, a unequivocally communities people return to are expected to be raid by a same issues that shabby an individual’s transgressions in a initial place. Secondly, there’s a tarnish — a prejudices people face when thankful to divulge a record of incarceration.

A new coffee association in Philadelphia called Quaker City Coffee is entrance a realities that lead to recidivism conduct on by providing returning adults with plain office opportunities in specialty coffee — jobs that not usually strap a workers’ skills, knowledge and work ethic into capability on a right side of a law, though support and inspire other forms of personal growth to lessen a hurdles they also face outward of work.

The proceed was primarily suggested to Quaker City co-owner Bob Logue by his Quaker business partner Christian Dennis, who spent over 5 years jailed on a drug assign himself.

“Kids flourishing adult in a bad neighborhoods demeanour adult to a drug dealers. It’s a enlightenment that’s roughly generational, where we have people that are innate into a sold environment, grow adult in a sold environment, and unequivocally don’t see any other options,” Logue told Daily Coffee News. “So, it’s looking during a fact that these guys are already business people, they’re already marketing, they’re already bargain of sales, distribution, packaging, all this other arrange of stuff.”

Logue, an gifted specialty coffee and liberality entrepreneur, fake a partnership with internal Philly spit High Point for collaborative growth and prolongation of Quaker City’s core roasted product. High Point non-stop a initial café about 11 years ago, and brought roasting in-house about dual years ago. Greens sourced by InterAmerican Coffee are now browned in 12-kilo Diedrich spit that lives in a same 3,800-square-foot prolongation trickery that houses High Point’s blurb indiscriminate bakery.

“I have my season profiles that we drive it towards, and afterwards between myself, my importer and my partners, we find a bean that works for us in a space that we need it to,” High Point spit Stephanie Rowley told Daily Coffee News. “I try not to make a bean do something that it doesn’t wish to. I’m some-more meddlesome in bringing out a best peculiarity of that bean.”

From left to right: Christain Dennis, Stephanie Rowley, Bob Logue

As for a Quaker City blends and profiles, Dennis, Logue and Rowley aim to land in a honeyed mark of appeal to intensity coffee drinkers not usually in a grocery and dilemma stores in a communities with that a company’s sales force is familiar, though with church groups, offices and incomparable institutions that support a company’s mission. Part of that interest is fundamentally also a price, that Logue pronounced Rowley helped keep accessibly low while still creation good on a guarantee of unusually high quality.

“Stephanie blows me away, 24-7. I’ve been using with a large indie-rock gods of coffee over a final six, 7 years, and a impulse we gifted her and her bargain and discernment to coffee, it altered my perspective of coffee,” Logue pronounced of a roasting relationship. “It’s been a smashing ride.”

Logue is a partner in Bodhi Coffee (no to be confused with California-based Bodhi Leaf Coffee Traders), that has dual coffee shops now using in Philadelphia. He’s also one of 4 partners in Federal Donuts, a dear boiled chicken, donuts and coffee grill with 5 locations in Philly, one in Nashville, Tenn., and one entrance shortly to Miami, Fla. And as of Jan of this year, each week a donut association has donated 500 pounds of “spare” ornithology tools to a creation of a bottom gas for a Rooster Soup Company, a for-profit soup grill with that Logue is also involved, and that donates 100 percent of a increase to a non-profit Broad Street Ministry, that offers giveaway dishes to people in need.

Quaker City Coffee is also a for-profit try with an charitable goal during a core. Employees will accept training and superintendence not usually in their workplace responsibilities, though will be compulsory and upheld in office of conversing and support for issues that need to be addressed outward of work.

“The existence for us as a association is in noticing that a employees have been unprotected to a really, unequivocally formidable lifestyle adult to this point, and it’s going to continue until we’re unequivocally means to move them in,” Logue said. “A large partial of what we’re doing with this association is providing a network of services for a employees, and we’re not only vocalization about it as if it’s a good idea.”

Logue said they’ve already lined adult a new sinecure for a association — a male with many years of jail knowledge who’s also now study to be a sociologist and counselor, and who will join a association to settle and run QCC’s dialect of staff amicable services.

At a front of a residence for many of a initial year, QCC will concentration wholly on coffee before presumably into expanding into tea and other food-related items, Logue said. Next month a Quaker City Coffee kiosk will open inside ancestral Philly unison gymnasium Electric Factory, and in a months that follow Logue will be transitioning a 10th Street Bodhi plcae into a initial full brick-and-mortar Quaker City café.

Logue pronounced he hopes that a Quaker City emporium will offer as a heart of village classification and support, where anything from organisation conversing to domestic meetings to communication slams can take place. He also hopes that notwithstanding a hurdles forward and a odds of bumps in a road, QCC provides possibly a indication for other businesses that have shown enterprise nonetheless hostility to sinecure returning citizens, or else a product that taps into that sentiment.

“I consider we’re going to strike a chord with a internal business community, institutions, universities and supervision operations, where we can simply contend to them, ‘Look, we know that you’re endangered about formulating jobs,’” he said. “‘You speak about it, you’d adore to emanate jobs for guys that recently got out of jail. You know that it’s a right thing to do for a community, though a existence is that your company’s not prepared to hoop a situation. We are. So only buy a coffee, and we will emanate jobs by default.’”

Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is a associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is formed in Portland, Oregon.

Tags: Bob Logue, Bodhi Coffee, Broad Street Ministry, Christian Dennis, Federal Donuts, High Point Coffee, InterAmerican Coffee, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Quaker City Coffee, Rooster Soup Company, Stephanie Rowley