Inside Berkeley’s Refugee-Run Cafe, Building New Lives With Coffee
Saveur reports on a special refugee business. 1951 Coffee opened in late January in Berkeley.
Back in Malaysia, where he’d paid an agent to smuggle him from his native Myanmar, Peter Karki had worked in a bar with a coffee machine, but it wasn’t anything fancy. And in the Nepali refugee camp where Karki had lived for 20 years after fleeing Bhutan with his family, there was only tea. But here in Berkeley, lattes are popular.
1951 Coffee is most likely the only the only third-wave coffee shop in the Bay Area where a lack of prior experience isn’t an impediment to employment; if anything, it’s expected. The cafe is the first from 1951 Coffee Company, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that provides job training and employment for refugees, specifically within the Bay Area’s ever-growing coffee industry. All of its ten employees are refugees, and about half are graduates of the nonprofit’s two-week barista training program. They each earn $13 an hour, and together represent Syria, Uganda, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, and Iran.
KJ