Love Coffee's Path to Purpose Training Program

What is really going on behind the scenes at Love Coffee? We're following in our founding organization's footsteps! Love Coffee is the brainchild of Chuck Crews and Love Columbia Co-Founders Jane Williams and Pat McMurry. Path to Purpose not only describes Love Coffee's training program, it also describes Love Coffee's journey. As former board member Renee Carter often says, "Everyone needs supported employment".

Love Columbia (then Love INC) pioneered the volunteer assisted adult human capacity development program currently used as their best practice. Love Coffee is now a separate organization building a similar program created for people with disabilities.

Love Coffee’s Path to Purpose program assists these individuals as they make the often daunting transition from high school to the general workforce.

It is a four part program that begins in high-school and completes with employment in Columbia area businesses. Participants engage at the point they best fit and can advance as abilities or desire indicates. The goal is to find the perfect fit for each person!

Path to Purpose’s features include supported job skills training, volunteer mentorship, and job search and placement upon graduation. It is structured around the requirements of Competitive Integrated Employment (CIE), an institutional best practice. Here’s how it works:

Step 1 Initial Assessment - Work Experience Partnership with Columbia Public Schools Special Education Department. During the 2022/23 school year CPS students participated in Love Coffee/Camacho Coffee work blocks - assisting the retail bagged coffee packaging and shipping operations. Though currently dormant, Step ! provides context for relationships with students to develop and their interest in Love Coffee’s programs to be explored.

Step 2 Initial Transition at Love Coffee’s Business Loop bakery and café. Participants begin competitive wage employment, assisted by program staff and peer employees. Café patrons are drawn by Love Coffee’s mission and provide a supportive customer base as students develop self-confidence and learn customer service, soft skills, baking, barista services, food prep and cashiering.

Step 3 Secondary Transition at the Columbia Orthopaedic Group and Columbia Post Acute kiosks. Those progressing in the program advance to the COG kiosk. The pace is faster, has more customers and customers are not necessarily drawn by the mission. This is transition to a real world work environment that further develops confidence and equally important, social capital. Love Coffee plans to add a volunteer assistance component at this phase of the program. Volunteer advocates will develop mentoring friendships with participants to encourage and cheer-lead as they make progress. This is a model used by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Love Columbia, and others. This is the secret sauce of the Love Coffee model. (note* Boone County CASA Executive Director Kelly Hill, working with Love INC's Jane Williams - created what is now Love Columbia's volunteer based Extra Mile Program - for her Master's thesis at MU in 2012)

Step 4 Transition into the general workforce. Working with Love Coffee assistance, those progressing from the kiosk stage find Competitive Integrated Employment at Columbia area businesses.

The intent of the Volunteer Advocate program is for the friendships - formed while staffing shifts at the kiosk - to accompany participants into the workforce and beyond. Here is where two oft-repeated quotes from Love Columbia are helpful; from volunteers: “I got so much out of my relationship with “Cassie” I felt she helped me more than I helped her”. From participants: “It was 'Marie’s belief in me that gave me the courage and support to move forward and envision a better future for myself, I couldn’t have done it without her”.

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These four steps form the core programs and rationale behind Love Coffee’s job skills training tracks. Both Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and Department of Mental Health (DMH) have Supported Employment and Pre-vocational Training programs. Because Love Coffee covers much of its program costs with cafe sales it's cost per hour for these services is less than half of the state funded counterparts.

Love Coffee has had limited success in all of these areas and there are ample opportunities to fully optimize Love Coffee's program. There is nearly unanimous support for this volunteer assisted workforce inclusion model among Columbia employment training experts. It is a program whose time has come. Love Coffee intends to further develop vital relationships with other educational partners in Columbia and become an important part of our already remarkable educational resources. But building this program on sales from cups of coffee and pastries is as daunting as transitioning to the workforce is for some of the program participants. Love Coffee needs your help. Please consider Love Coffee's Path to Purpose program in your year-end giving plans and join the team building this significant institutional construction project.

If you would like to find out more about Love Coffee's progress towards these goals contact admin@columbialovecoffee.org for a personal overview. Thank you!