Off The Ground Coffee House

I am one of the owners and managing directors off the Ground Coffee House which is here alongside my buddy Joshua Brody. We are a speciality coffee shop and social enterprise designed to give people a fantastic coffee experience but also help the homeless as well in the long run. A social enterprise is kind of that halfway house between a for-profit business and a charity. We make profit for a coffee shop, we make money for a great coffee and food that we're selling here from the atmosphere that we provide for people that haven't away from the world. But what we do with some of that profit is we channel it into activities that help the homeless, get them how you Quite new, we only opened a month ago. So the long term goal is to perhaps invest some of these profits when we know exactly how much we're making and what we need to save for ourselves into projects in the town that are doing good works, that are solving the issues that surround homelessness because it's a really complex issue. What we're doing in the interim very soon we're running our first social activities which are called Eat and Meet sessions. So in this space that we have here we're going to be holding a meal for the homeless and they will come in, they will get some food and then over time what we will do at these meals, we will introduce them to various characters and representatives of organisations who can help them and solve their problems. In terms of the partners we've got working with, Middlesbrough Council very important, they do a lot of work in particular, the community welfare team who work there. I really want them to be able to meet people who can deal with some of the root causes of their homelessness, talking mental health, drinking alcohol addiction, talking managed accommodation, whatever they need that can really get them back into society because it's a very lonely place out there. We've met a lot of people in the last three or six months setting up these activities, lots of different charities, lots of different social enterprises who are doing various bits and bobs around town with the homelessness and it's really about finding the ones that make the biggest impact or perhaps that need that little bit of funding to kind of make a couple of projects work and then kind of really holding in there, finding where I'm when I can do the most good, there's the potential perhaps in the future maybe have some people behind the counter here working with us, perhaps giving them some work experience, it's really challenging when you're out on the streets.