Refuge Coffee

I'm Kitty Murray. I'm the founder and chief excitement officer of Refuge Coffee. Refuge Coffee Company is a non-profit coffee business. We're a job training program for resettled refugees, so we provide a full-time living wage job, job training and mentorship for resettled refugees right here in Atlanta's own backyard. We're also a space that is welcoming, agendalist, safe for the whole community, really for anyone. And then we do catering, which just enables us to take the message of welcome beyond the tiny little city of Clarkston into the rest of Atlanta. My husband and I live here in the middle of Clarkston. Time magazine called us the most diverse square mile in the country. So we live in a refugee community and the coffee shop is just a very small opportunity for people who don't need big opportunities. They just need a little bit in order to thrive. When we moved here, one of the things I kept thinking was, I want the people I know who don't live here to know the people who live here. And so coffee shop just seemed The other reason is that this was a way to provide a few jobs, to do job training, again, to create opportunities. One of the things we observed was that a lot of refugees are in survival mode for so long, they haven't had the luxury of dreaming about the future. So here we try to encourage them to dream about the future and to figure out what their next steps need to be and then to kind of support those steps. Our refugee trainees do all our catering and so people get to interact with them. They get to show them their amazing customer service skills and they sort of get a picture of, oh, people from these countries are, they're not scary and they're not a drain on the economy. They look how much they give us. It's a subtle message, but I think it's a really powerful one. I would just love for you to come and check us out. We're just half a mile outside of 285, four miles away from Decatur. We'really close. Come have coffee with us one day.