In a neighborhood on the south side of Providence, the pleasant glow of the Friendship Cafe beckons people from all walks of life to come in from the cold and share a meal together. Low-income residents living in surrounding affordable housing units and local politicians can sample delicious sandwiches named after familiar names of the neighborhood.
And it was here at the Friendship Cafe that members of Word! gathered Thursday evening to perform pieces for an audience of fellow Brown students.
Embarking on his self-proclaimed "virgin Word! experience," poet Paul Tran '14 told The Herald that he wanted to show who he is through his work. He wrote a piece about his own community in California. There, he said, many struggled with poverty and hardship. Tran's poem was a stark contrast from his upbeat introduction, as he expressed his raw emotions through his performance. In the piece, he described entrapment in a world "black like the sewers, black like the sky split by thunder."
The venue where Tran performed is more than meets the eye. Located within a mixed-use affordable housing community, the cafe offers a cozy dining atmosphere. Knowing the cafe's role in the community reveals its character more than a loaf of bread or the amiable lighting ever could.
Of, by and for the community
The cafe wastes no opportunity to funnel support back into the very community that molded it into existence.
The eatery opened in May as a business venture intended to raise revenue for Amos House, Rhode Island's largest soup kitchen. But the cafe benefits the community in many more ways, said Jill Moniz '04, vice president of marketing for Amos House Works.
Amos House Works is the for-profit business division of Amos House that currently consists of three enterprises partly staffed by graduates of its own job training programs.
The cafe grew out of the More than a Meal catering group, which Amos House Works established after graduates certified in catering still failed to find job placements, Moniz said.
These Amos House programs and the cafe feed off one another, working to draw up revenue for Amos House while also providing jobs and fueling the local economy, to achieve a "triple bottom line," according to the cafe's menu.
Originally designed to provide healthy food alternatives to residents of the affordable housing and business complex, the cafe also provides a support system fulfilling the needs of low-income and displaced workers who are part of a job training program, Moniz said.
Halfway through the Amos Culinary Education program, some students complete an internship at the cafe, and many of the current full-time employees are also graduates of the program, said Geneva Johnson, the program's coordinator.
And that's not all. The wooden seats and tables at the eatery contain placards revealing that participants in the Amos Carpentry Training Program made all of the furniture out of scrap materials. At the cafe, everything is clearly an inside job — an innovative enterprise of, by and for the community it serves.
Expanding horizons
So how did such a locally-based enterprise burst the Brown bubble and attract students to a night of poetry and food that would raise revenue for the cafe? The answer lies in the commitment of a group of students bent on helping the Friendship Cafe succeed.
The collaborative event between the cafe and Word! performers represents the culmination of a marketing campaign project several students undertook this semester for the class ENGN 1930Q: "Social Entrepreneurship," said Briana McGeough '12, one of the students involved in the project. The course, taught by four professors, assigned students to work with different local and international agencies.
"We were given a general framework" to spread awareness of the cafe to the student population, McGeough said. "We were given a fair amount of freedom to decide what that meant."
They decided to organize this poetry event to gauge interest in the cafe and spread awareness, she said. The group has also been conducting surveys to see if students would go to the cafe if it were open later at night. The cafe is usually open until 2:30 p.m., when local high schoolers and college students are usually unavailable.
"Friendship Cafe has really become a community home" for a wide range of people, Moniz said. The student organizers sought to add the student population into this community mix.
Soul and solidarity
This sense of community and solidarity resonated in the pieces the Word! students chose to perform at last Thursday's event.
Tran's poem about his own struggling community easily fit the setting, as Amos House faces record numbers of people using its services in light of a bad economy.
Tran's poem dealt with dark but empowering themes of finding freedom and oneself amidst poverty.
"I come from a community where half of the students didn't even graduate from high school," Tran told The Herald, adding that many people in his community dreamt of freeing themselves from poverty.
"To crawl out of sewers, holding the future in one hand and the dreams you buried in the other," Tran recited, "wet swollen dreams full of feces and of too many summers spent waiting for food stamps and wildfires to crawl through your windows."
Tran told The Herald that he hopes each poem says a bit about who he is as a person.
Much of the night's poetry expressed these themes of pain, a well-known fact of life for many of the cafe's regular customers. Many of the poems captured the shared experience of communities enduring in the face of struggle.
In a poem in prayer form, Zack Ballard '13 recognized the common struggles people face throughout life, urging God to "remind us, remind us of our heads in our hands."
And Laura Brown-Lavoie '10.5 chose a piece about the bond she shared with her younger sister that extended outward to address a larger sense of sisterhood in the poem's conclusion.
"I had to wait 16 months for the rest of me to be born," she began, expanding the poem to connect to all women, exclaiming, "sisters, let us share our love."
During the readings, students had an opportunity to show support for the cafe by purchasing meals, which were discounted by 15 percent.
"This has been a great example of how you can combine nonprofits with models of business," said Bridget McGinn '11, another student organizer of the event.
McGinn said she has learned a lot about Amos House in the course of the experience.
McGeough agreed. "I am very interested in enterprises pertaining to social justice," she said.
(Disclosure: Herald Deputy Managing Editor Emmy Liss '11 is one of the four students working on the Friendship Cafe project.)
