Coffee emporium empowers employees with special needs

CHARLESTON, SC (CBS News) — We’ve been greeted with a outrageous assisting of Southern hospitality, generally during a coffee emporium where you’ll find a lot of benevolence — and not usually on a menu.

At Bitty and Beau’s Coffee Shop, string candy frappes are a residence specialty and unequivocally popular.

But they’re not a usually thing that creates this place truly special. It’s a people who work here, like Trista Kutcher, who showed CBS News how to qualification a beverage.

“As a primogenitor of a child with special needs, we start meditative about their future,” a shop’s owner, Amy Wright, told CBS News. “And one of a obstacles that people with disabilities face is anticipating suggestive employment. And [this] coffee emporium was innate out of that need.”

Two of Amy’s children have Down syndrome: Bitty and Beau.

“For a prolonged time, people with disabilities have had opportunities to work, though they’ve been in a back,” Wright explained. “Their faces haven’t been seen and so, during Bitty and Beau’s Coffee, a initial face we see when we travel in is someone like Sam.”

Sam Hazeltine told CBS News: “I’m here to do some work.  I’m not here to disaster around. we adore dance parties though I’m here to get a pursuit done.”

Sometimes dance parties are partial of a job, generally given Hazeltine was recently promoted.

“Everybody that walks by a doors here leaves with new perspective,” Wright added. “Knows that these people — their lives have value, and they merit to be supposed and included.”

“Me, Trista, we’re not broken,” Hazeltine said. “We’re not broken.”

There are now 5 Bitty and Beau’s Coffee Shops contracting 120 people with special needs.

“We unequivocally feel like this is a place of hope, and we’re usually removing started,” Wright said.