Sandwiches, Italian Sodas and Changing Lives

Hope Café has just passed its first birthday, marking a big year of growth, changes, and most importantly the journey of powerful and uplifting impact made in the lives of so many local youth. The café started off as a vision to provide a place for young people where they could learn important workplace skills all while being part of an encouraging and supportive community; an uplifting environment that many of them haven’t been a part of before.

A big step made in our first year journey towards this vision was to start training volunteers, opening up our kitchen to help youth learn the ropes of working in hospitality. For many of the volunteers it was their first time in a workplace, with tasks such as finding their way around the kitchen, learning how to interact with customers and other staff members, and juggling making different menu items in the busy lunch rushes being a big step for many of them. It’s incredible to see their persistence as they continue to learn and succeed in taking these steps forward.

We’ve even already seen 20 volunteers go through the training, with 8 finding further employment, 7 reconnecting with education or going onto further studies, such as at university, and 5 a mixture of both finding employment and further education. Currently there are 12 volunteers in the training program, each doing incredible work helping to run the café.

Nixon is one of these volunteers training at Hope Café and has thoroughly enjoyed his learning experience over the past several months. Nixon and I sat down for a chat as I asked him some questions about his experience so far...

How did you find out about the Hope Café training program and why did you want to give it a go?

“I found out about the program through my parents, not sure how they found it, might have been through Facebook. I wanted to give it a go because I want a future in hospitality and I thought it would be good work experience.”

What is your favourite part of working in the café?

“Probably being able to actually make and prepare all the food and drinks; the people, whether it’s the people working or the customers; and just the environment... from the pillars to the walls, all the colours, to the record player and the chairs, and on the other side with the costumes, just everything.”

What’s some of the skills you’ve learnt through training that you can see yourself using in the future?

 “Definitely food preparation and the safety of everything. How to talk to customers, that’s a big one and I’m good at that. The handling of money. Learning about restocking of the food. If I go down another café path, then I’d need to be doing these things, whereas if I go to be a qualified chef, it would be more to do with food safety stuff, like how long you can keep a sandwich for. Also the correct order to make a sandwich, I found that unusual.”

Do you have a favourite menu item? Is there anything you’d recommend?

“It would probably be the Italian soda. It’s a fizzy drink where you get to choose up to four flavours, so the combinations are almost limitless, with 33 flavours available. My favourite would probably have to be my most recent one, which was Tropical, Strawberry, Pink Grapefruit and Blood Orange.”

If you were to talk to someone else who was interested in training in the café, what would you tell them about your time here?

“The atmosphere and the people are really nice, whether its customers or employees. There’s a million things to look at even when there’s no customers, you could probably spend 5 years here and still learn more things. From the look of the outside you wouldn’t expect there to be so much in here, it’s just a really warm environment. They’ve also got a bunch of boardgames for if you get bored, although I don’t think you can play them on the job.”

Is there anything you’ve learnt about yourself through volunteering here?

“I think I’ve learnt that this is where I want to work when I’m older. I haven’t tried out what I’m going to do on the other sides of my future, but from what I’ve had here, I don’t know whether it’s the shop or the work, but from what this is it looks like a good direction for me to go.”

We’re all very excited looking into our second year at Hope Café, and more than anything we’re excited to see and be able to support the journeys of many more young people. God’s hand is truly in the work done here at Hope Café and we praise him for the growth in confidence, resilience and ability to work we get to see each day.

If you know a young person who might want to join the Hope Café team as a volunteer, or if you yourself are a young person looking for some work experience, then we would love to hear from you by calling us at the café number, 0475 628 735, or by dropping into the café at 90 St John Street, Launceston, open 8am to 3pm from Monday to Saturday. If you would like to donate to Teen Challenge to help the café continue its important work in our community, then head to the donations section of our website at https://www.teenchallengetasmania.org/donate.

This Blog is written by

Alissa Sharpe. Alissa was one of our first trainees in Hope Cafe when we opened it over a year ago. She now passes on skills she has learnt to new yougn people. She is also chasing her dream of a career in writing, creative arts and film making.