Students raise $200K to save bean-roasting shop that helps DTES women
Pandemic had almost finished off the social enterprise East Van Roasters, which now hopes to expand thanks to the Vancouver Social Value Fund
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You can’t put a dollar figure on the value of helping someone turn their life around, but $200,000 is a good start.
A student-led social-impact investment fund called Vancouver Social Value Fund raised the amount to not only keep East Van Roasters afloat, but to help it expand.
The chocolate- and coffee-bean social enterprise provides opportunities for vulnerable and marginalized women to re-enter the workforce, using a business model to address a community issue while creating a compassionate and non-judgmental work environment.
“We have staff that have come from the community, we have women who are vulnerable and have had challenging times in their life and were unable to find employment at other places,” Shelley Bolton, executive director and chocolatier at East Van Roasters, said.
The shop provides a welcome and safe space where staff get first aid and NARCAN training, learn chocolatiering and making coffee, and learning to do sales and customer service.
“It’s professional skills,” Bolton said. “It’s also life skills.”
In her nine years with EVR, she has seen women come to the shop who are withdrawn and lacking confidence, then blossom.
“If you’ve been living rough or homeless for a long time, or you’re street-entrenched, sometimes just having a conversation with somebody, even somebody looking you in the eye, can be challenging,” Bolton said.
“When you’re learning about something new like coffee and chocolate and you’re just talking about that, when that’s what the focus is on, it’s easier to talk about that than it is to talk about yourself or what’s going on with you.”
A lot of time when people are in a challenging time in their life, the questions they hear are personal and directed from their doctor or their social worker or their counsellor, Bolton said.
“So to be in an environment where there’s something interesting going on that you want to learn about and that you can share with other people, it’s a nice way to get your confidence back.”
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Social enterprises often have trouble getting financing and are thus undercapitalized. Without the $200,000 raised by the UBC students, Bolton said 12 women would be out of work.
“The pandemic hit a lot of businesses and made it challenging for quite a few of them and EVR was one of them, unfortunately,” UBC student Annie Chapel, who manages the Vancouver Social Value Fund, said. “We heard about EVR through one of our community partners and we definitely wanted to step in, considering the impact they have and the people they help.
“They’re a solid business, they have a solid business plan, we’re just helping them transition.”
The coffee and cacao beans are organic and fair-trade. The labels of origin on the dozens of bags of beans piled against East Van Rosters’ brick walls read like a Lonely Planet guide to the Caribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.
The aroma of coffee and chocolate envelops and soothes the senses.
Some of the women who have worked at East Van Roasters have told Bolton that before that, they had nothing in life to look forward to.
“The opportunity, having hopefulness, I think that’s is the biggest thing,” Bolton said.
Source: vancouversun.com