Kingdom Coffee

This is the beginning. I grew up with a father that was addicted to heroin. And it was hard to grow up with that. And he was on and off the streets and he was in another jail. And finally my parents got divorced when I was seven, and I didn't really hear from my dad for about 15 years. And then we got a call from my dad and he said that he was in a recovery center. And he said that four men had found him on the streets and found him shooting heroin. And they ground him through recovery center and it saved his life. And then he was in the process of getting sober. And then my dad was five years sober and he was helping other people get off the streets in Calgary. And my dad was working construction and he ended up passing away in a workplace accident. When that happened, my wife and me were So we just went down with a box of Starbucks coffee from Memorial Drive and then walked over to the Calgary Dropping Center and just sat down in the cold month of January and just started giving away one cup at a time. And it turned to one cup, two cups, three cups. Just sharing the story of my dad, sharing that he could be in an addiction for 30 years and then he could come out of it and find hope and be the grandpa and the dad that he always wanted to be. And going from the grandpa that my kids feared to the grandpa that my kids loved and ran to as he got walked to the door. So this just motivated us to just see change in other people's lives. So it started off with that one box and then two boxes, three boxes. Then before long, were given away $300, $400 in coffee a week. And we're So what do we do? My dad, when he died, we had $15,000 from the accident. So we bought a coffee roaster. We had no idea to roast coffee, but we bought it because we wanted to roast coffee so we can give coffee away and help us support giving coffee away. So I taught myself how to roast coffee. I learned from a few other coffee roasters in town and developed my skills. And every Saturday for the last six years, we feed two to 300 people every Saturday. We feed them a hot dog, we give them a muffin, and we give them a fresh cup of coffee.