"From the City of Big Shoulders, Not Big Overpriced Lattes ... "

Café Chicago

A Project of the Latino Union of Chicago and the Chicago Coffee Confederation

Generating New Models of Social Action, Job Creation, and Not-for-Profit Funding

Café Chicago is a worker-made, worker-owned, and worker-operated cooperative that will roast, package, and distribute great tasting, fair trade, organic coffee in the Chicago area. With a new model of fostering social action, creating new economic engines, and generating cooperative forms of ownership and vision, Cafe Chicago will make living wage jobs and provide training in coffee roasting and cooperative management while funding the social justice organizing of the Latino Union at a time of dwindling non-profit funding. By combining a Workers’ Center and hiring hall for immigrant day laborers with a café and coffee roaster, Café Chicago will serve as a gathering place for community members who share values of cooperation and collaboration and want to act in solidarity with the poor. It will create new public, working class, democratic spaces for collective action, where workers and community members can gather for socializing and cultural and musical exchange, and to find work.

The Actors and the Analysis.
The Latino Union and the Chicago Coffee Confederation share a motivation to support the rights of low-income immigrants in Chicago. These organizations are committed to generating a project - Café Chicago – that addresses issues of economic injustice while spurring a movement towards self-determination and empowerment among the city’s most vulnerable residents, the day laborers who congregate by the hundreds on the city’s street corners seeking work.Café Chicago seeks to address real and growing economic and social failures within our society. Immigrants are exploited by our economic and business models, then targeted for repression by nativist and anti-immigrant groups. A class of owners and managers not doing the actual work makes decisions in the work place. Jobs are often meaningless and often put workers into the unfortunate role of constructing their own demise (i.e., day laborers and other workers in low-income areas building and renovating the condos that will ultimately displace them from their own neighborhood).

The ongoing economic recession centered on the collapsed housing industry, corrupt and predatory financial firms and disproportionate allocation of government resources on military spending has led to the erosion of the social safety net, a double digit unemployment rate and conditions ripe for worker exploitation. Rates of poverty, joblessness, homelessness, foreclosure, and workplace abuses have skyrocketed, placing grassroots not-for-profits in a two-fold dilemma: an increased demand for support and organizing from struggling communities and depleted resources as corporate, foundation, government and individual contributions decline.

The Latino Union recognizes the need for a new model that values human beings and our longing for freedom, justice and community at every step of the process and seeks to establish alternative economic structures that model a different way of making a living, of developing real vocation, of funding social change. This new models of social interaction prizes equality, integrates community organizing and economic justice, promotes cooperation and solidarity through collaboration, and builds communities in resistance to poverty, oppression and injustice. Café Chicago grows out of this search for real alternatives by the staff and day laborers of Latino Union of Chicago and out of the experience of solidarity-minded small-batch coffee roasters from the Chicago Coffee Confederation who making a living roasting fair trade, organic coffee while raising much-needed funds for women’s equality, immigrant rights, and other social justice organizations. The project joins the Latino Union’s six years of experience in running a day laborer-run hiring hall that’s provided wages over 150% higher than the street corner average with zero incidents of wage theft, with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, and its six years of community coffee roasting experience providing fair trade, organic coffee to Chicagoans that also generates $2,000 annually to social justice organizations including the Latino Union. Building on this history, the organizations are partnering to launch Café Chicago.

Café Chicago grows out of the Latino Union’s work and that of the Chicago Coffee Confederation, both working to fight the root cause of poverty and oppression. It grows out of a desire and a commitment to creating meaningful, living wage and socially relevant work owned and controlled by workers themselves.

Worker Cooperative Model: Embedded Social Enterprise.
Café Chicago utilizes the mission-centric embedded social enterprise model that locates enterprise activities within the Latino Union’s community organizing and is central to its mission of developing the tools necessary to collectively improve social and economic conditions for low income, immigrant workers. The comprehensive relationship of this model is the simultaneous achievement of financial, social and economic benefits for low-income workers in Chicagoland. Café Chicago is being incorporated as a for-profit venture, with profits going fully to fund the work of the Latino Union.

Café Chicago’s embedded social enterprise is a worker cooperative that employs the following business activities and strategies:
- Grassroots Marketing - Educational marketing through various social media outlets will educate the public about the day labor movement, the positive community impact of purchasing the coffee, and the social benefits of fair trade, worker cooperative purchasing;
- Localized Distribution - Coffee will be directly delivered by day laborers by bike and by CTA (creating a whole other set of jobs and Latino Union outreach avenues), and sold to local restaurants, community organizations, and progressive Chicagoans who want their purchases to go beyond fair trade and organic, to promote movement building and social change;
- Just & Quality Coffee – In addition to freshly roasted, delicious tasting coffee, Café Chicago products will incorporate environmentally friendly, socially responsible practices in all steps of the process;
- Positive Social Impact – Café Chicago integrates international solidarity, leadership development, worker organizing, and self-determination into its cooperative model to enact change that improves the lives of the poor locally and internationally;
- Financial Sustainability – By combining low-income job creation and training with a Workers’ Center earned income program, Café Chicago strengthens its impact through self-sufficient fundraising that supports a broader community of day laborers.


Collaboration and Partnerships.
Both the Latino Union and the Chicago Coffee Confederation are generating outside support for Café Chicago. Alderman Helen Shiller has offered space within the proposed Green Center she and activists in Uptown are creating near Broadway and Sunnyside. This location would not only provide space for the roasting operation, but also establish a partnership with many other poor people’s organizations concerned with issues of justice and environmental sustainability.

Additional support is being generated by holding informational and energy-generating events in different parts of the city at sites such as the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, and with other organizations that share a commitment to justice. Technical support for starting up the roasting operation will come from the Chicago Coffee Confederation’s long-time relationship with Just Coffee staff in Madison, Wisconsin and with New Leaf Natural Grocery in Chicago. The Confederation’s staff is currently engaged in research into the formation, structure, and maintenance of worker-owned cooperatives by interviewing staff at Just Coffee and Peace Coffee in Minnesota.


Café Chicago Operational Focus and Strategies.
Café Chicago will take the expertise of the garage roasters of the Chicago Coffee Confederation (CCC) and expand its work horizontally and on a much larger scale by blending that experience with the work of the Latino Union. The Latino Union’s track record of working for justice with day laborers and low-income, immigrant communities, combined with the organization’s long-standing partnership with the CCC, leads to a new idea for funding the Latino Union during tough economic times.

The roasting operation will also benefit the community work of many other social justice organizations in Chicago. Making environmentally responsible, energy-efficient, high-speed roasting equipment available for use by other organizations will generate funds for programs and projects that get sidelined in the process of seeking declining corporate and governmental funding. Using some features of community-based bike shops like Working Bikes and Ciclo Urbano, the hub will also open its doors and its expertise to youth seeking out meaningful work, experience and knowledge of the world, and to others interested in the art and craft of socially-relevant coffee roasting and organizing for social justice. Café Chicago will rock “the city that works” within a collective and democratic framework that challenges the business status quo. Rather than generating profits for a single owner and a managerial class, this project will serve to replace dwindling not-for-profit funding for Latino Union, while generating living wage jobs and work that provides a sense of accomplishment that can only enhance a social justice movement rooted in self-determination, empowerment and poverty alleviation.

By initiating Café Chicago, the Latino Union is increasing workers’ power over working conditions and taking decision making out of the hands of exploitative employers, and putting that power into the hands of the immigrant workers. Café Chicago has developed the following four-year strategy, ensuring that the project is successful and sustainable and that justice is served from coffee grower to shipper to Café Chicago worker to organizational supporters – the customers who buy Café Chicago. By the end of four years, Café Chicago will be generating 100% of the Latino Union’s current level of funding, supplementing the organization’s work and replacing funding lost during this economic downturn.

Year One
Secure Start-Up Resources: Raise funds necessary for project startup, set at $50,000 for procuring equipment and consumable and non-consumable supplies, paying rent and utilities, and ensuring three months’ wages and oversight costs. Because of collaboration with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, three months’ wages will prove sufficient, for distribution networks and relationships with retail and wholesale outlets are already established, allowing the project to hit the ground running. Wages will be paid out of coffee sales in full three months after project startup.

Market and Promote Café Chicago Citywide: A crucial component of our financial strategy is bringing the work of the Latino Union and the plight of immigrant day laborers to the attention of the city’s progressive community, particularly in and around immigrant and gentrifying neighborhoods. The day laborers working within Café Chicago will initiate and conduct door-to-door marketing through flyering, and setting up coffee sampling tables at train stops at rush hour. Staff and workers will tap into extensive social networking avenues. And, media contacts in large citywide print media have explicitly expressed their desire to write and publish stories about the inception of Café Chicago, as have local and national NPR broadcasters. This media splash will support the very localized, word-of-mouth nature of our startup plan.

Establish Job Creation, Training, and Leadership Development Components: Months one to six will commence with equipment setup and training, with roasting and sales beginning at the end of month one. With current contacts, both general and organizational, income will begin at a rate of $1,000 per week at the end of month one. Contact with cafes and other retail and wholesale outlets begins month two. Strategy focuses on providing a quality coffee grown by La FEM women’s cooperative in Nicaragua – fair trade and organic – at a reasonable price, but one where the social enterprise nature of the project will garner wide support from Chicago’s large progressive social justice community. Experiences related by folks at Just Coffee in Madison and Peace Coffee in Minneapolis support the idea that Chicago is hungry for coffee that goes beyond fair trade and organic, that has a focus on justice and liberation as well. To build relationships with these roasters, Café Chicago’s project board and workers will lead a delegation to Just Coffee to promote exchange, development, and movement building amongst fellow worker cooperatives. Simultaneous with this approach of cafes and businesses, the model of direct marketing and delivery by bicycle and public transportation used for six years by members of the Chicago Coffee Confederation will evolve into an equal role. Direct marketing has the benefit of eliminating the middleman, thus returning far more of the cost of the coffee to the project and the organization.

Stabilize Cooperative Operations: Months seven to twelve will see the stabilization of Café Chicago brand name in Chicago, working first within the city’s progressive community. By the end of year one, the sale of 500 pounds of coffee per week will put the organization at a point where one-fifth of its funding is provided by coffee sales. Upon completing technology training, provided by Latino Union staff, Café Chicago workers will be capacitated to use the comprehensive, online data-tracking software Salesforce to drill down production, clientele, distribution, and sale trends.

With a slow buildup, starting with roasting 100 pounds of coffee per week, by the end of year one Café Chicago projects roasting 500 pounds per week. Total coffee roasted for year one, 18,000 pounds. With a projected price per pound of $10 (average of wholesale and retail), this is a gross income of $180,000. With costs set at $6.67 per pound, or two thirds of gross, this nets $60,000 of unrestricted funds for the Latino Union. This could be accomplished on the Sivetz 10-pound roaster with relative ease; the quarter-bag roaster (37-pound) would lessen the time spent roasting, and would not need to be replaced after two years of our projected growth. Labor costs per pound are placed at $1 per pound, based on our mentoring company’s current costs.

Year Two
Sustainably Expand Market: Year two brings Café Chicago to the wider coffee-drinking public in Chicago, exposing the coffee and the work of the organization to a much wider audience. Marketing strategy continues along the lines of working through word-of-mouth, social networking, and media attention – not simply drawing attention to our product, but to the work of the Latino Union. This marketing supports our financial strategy of a slow but steady build in sales, one that allows Café Chicago to grow at a rate that allows for constant toggling, reflection on process, and ensuring that product, marketing, and profits remain in line with the organization’s primary work. Anticipated outcomes at the end of year two are to net over $100,000 to fund the organization’s work, while employing 15 day laborers part-time at a living wage, roasting and delivering coffee and staffing the cafe.

Year Three
Develop and Expand Organizing Capacity: Upon establishing a successful workers’ cooperative/workers’ center model, Café Chicago will achieve a level of viability capable of making significant financial contributions to the development and expansion of workers centers’ programming capacity. Coupling the expanded resources and capacity with the changing demands and realities of the underground contingent worker economy, the project will have the tools to broaden the scope of community organizing, public policy advocacy, leadership development, and coalition work used by Latino Union to realize its mission. Anticipated outcomes are increasing income by 50% and employing 2 day labor organizers full time.

Promote Café Chicago as a National Model: After three years of development and operation, Café Chicago will serve as a national model for worker organizations seeking to address economic and social shortcomings within current dominant employment structures while building grassroots social justice movements. Through detailed data and development tracking and the compiling of personal expertise and three years of hands-on experience, Latino Union will collaborate with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to create comprehensive training resources and materials for the 42 member workers centers on how to create, establish, and develop an embedded social enterprise of workers-cooperatives for low-income, immigrant worker organizations.

Year Four
By the end of year four, we project that Cafe Chicago will net the Latino Union funds equal to the organization's current budget, over $300,000.


Cafe Chicago Market Analysis and Strategy.
The market for Café Chicago’s coffee is nearly untapped in the city of Chicago.

There are many small to medium coffee roasting businesses in Chicago, as in any city. What Chicago lacks is a business whose goal is not monetary profit, but furthering the social change work of a prominent, local justice-seeking organization. In fact, there is no such existing coffee roaster in the country doing this work at present.

In Chicago, local roasting is dominated by two medium-sized companies, Intelligensia and Metropolis. Several smaller companies, including Castillo and Bridgeport, also have some market share. While all make a point to offer some fair trade organic coffees, and all use some sort of ‘direct trade’ algebra in the procurement of their beans, merely ensuring a good price be paid for beans does not guarantee many other areas of concern to justice and social change seekers.

What most progressives, radicals, and fair trade and living wage advocates want, is a coffee that has been ushered into their coffee cups with attention not only to fair prices and sustainable organic growing practices, but a comprehensive, justice-based approach at every step. What Café Chicago offers is fair trade, organic coffee. What Café Chicago offers, in addition, is a social change vision. This includes choosing coffees that go beyond fair trade standards, that might benefit the liberation of women in Nicaragua, the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas – that benefit liberation struggles, a focus that is not necessarily part and parcel of the fair trade model. Additionally, Café Chicago ensures living wages at its roasting facility; ensures that we as workers learn the cooperative skills and social consciousness that come with consensus decision making and that will build strong, resilient social movements; and ensures that all profits go to the furtherance of the struggles of immigrant day laborers with whom the Latino Union has been working for a decade.

The only company marketing in Chicago with a similar (but non-local) focus is Just Coffee, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Just Coffee does ensure justice at each stage of their process, from plantation to coffee cup, and raises much-needed funds for organizations around the country. Café Chicago is fortunate to have a long-standing and cordial relationship with Just Coffee, where our marketing strategies can be geared in such a way that we can work together, rather than in competition.

Café Chicago’s marketing strategy is inseparable from the organization’s overall strategy of improving the social and economic conditions of immigrant workers and communities in Chicago. The model looks at the solidarity sentiments of the city’s progressive and radical communities, and assesses how to best bring those sentiments into an active role in supporting immigrant workers’ rights.

Towards this end, we have developed the following short-range but expandable marketing strategy, which will ensure the future success and sustainability of the project while ensuring that justice is served in every cup of coffee.

Café Chicago will tap Chicago’s nearly-untapped market for a fair trade, organic, liberation-oriented coffee in a hundred ways, utilizing the tools of the day, the talents of an ever-widening circle of supporters, and the six years’ experience of our partners in the Chicago Coffee Confederation (CCC). The CCC has already established distribution networks and relationships with retail and wholesale outlets, which in and of themselves will allow the project to hit the ground running at the projected rate mentioned in our financial projections. In fact, if Café Chicago only utilizes the CCC connection, the project is already self-sustaining.

But Café Chicago is set to operate on a much larger scale than the microroasting efforts of the CCC, which includes opening a full café by mid-2011, a café which also serves the vital social function of a Workers Center, on the model of the Latino Union’s current Albany Park Workers Center.

A crucial component of our marketing strategy is bringing the work of the Latino Union and the plight of immigrant day laborers to the attention of the city’s progressive community, particularly in and around immigrant and gentrifying neighborhoods. The day laborers working with Café Chicago and the Latino Union will initiate and conduct door-to-door marketing through flyering, and set up coffee sampling tables at train stops at rush hour. Staff and workers will tap into extensive social networking avenues, from Twitter to Facebook to MySpace.

Media contacts in large city-wide print media have explicitly expressed their desire to write and publish stories about the inception of Café Chicago, as have local and national NPR broadcasters. This media splash will support the very localized, word-of-mouth nature of our startup plan. The media-friendly nature of the project eliminates the need to spend money on advertising.

Our marketing strategy will continue and expand along the lines of working through door-to-door contact, word-of-mouth, social networking, and media attention – drawing attention to our product, but also to the work of the Latino Union. This supports our financial strategy of a slow but steady build in sales, one that allows us – day laborers and staff – to grow at a rate that allows for constant toggling, reflection on process, and sustainable development of a new model, while ensuring that product, marketing, and profits remain in line with the organization’s primary work.

Café Chicago One-Year Timeline.

March to September, 2010.
Secure Funding.
Incorporate.
Develop Full Business Plan.
Set Up Accounting System.
Develop Logo and Marketing Materials, Hone Direct Marketing Strategies – Social Media, Email, Word-of-Mouth.
Connect with Café Chicago Customers: Cafés, Stores, Caterers, Individuals.
Continue Conceptualization of Café Chicago as a Social Enterprise, an Integral Part of the Latino Union Mission, and as a Site for Social Change.
Develop Relationships with Suppliers of Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Packaging.
Develop Labels with Local Artists.
Hold Two Cultural and Musical Fundraisers.
Get Press.
Buy Coffee Roaster, Coffee Supplies, Packaging Materials.
Install Coffee Roaster, Prepare Space.
Consult with Café Chicago Mentors: Jeff Furman of Ben and Jerry’s, Mike Moon of Just Coffee, Steve Parkes of New Leaf Natural Grocery.

September, 2010.
Delegation of Day Laborers to Annual Coop Coffees of America Meeting.
Develop Worker Cooperative, Discuss and Implement Consensus Decision-making.
Begin Roasting, at rate of 100 pounds of coffee per week.
Continue, Expand Marketing Efforts. Train day laborers in marketing.

October to December, 2010.
Expand Roasting Operations to 250 pounds per week.
Develop and Maintain Presence at Farmers’ Markets, Special Events.
Begin Holding Cultural Events Supporting Café Chicago.

January to August, 2011.
Expand Roasting Operations to 500 pounds per week.
Find Space for Café / Workers Center, to Open December 2011.


Conclusion.
Café Chicago: a worker-owned and worker-operated cooperative coffee roasting venture; an attached café and hiring hall; a model for funding the vital work of a low-income immigrant worker rights organization; a model for a bottom-up rather than top-down approach to the development of alternative economic structures, and thus a model of economic self-determination; a step towards low-income empowerment. Working to end poverty in this city that works, Café Chicago’s priorities of organizing, collaboration, cooperation, and solidarity contribute to vibrant, flourishing communities of justice, equality and liberation.

“Cafe Chicago. Taking the Windy City back to its roots as the City of Big Shoulders, Not the City of Big, Overpriced Lattes.”


About the Latino Union of Chicago.
The Latino Union is a democratic, worker-led organization that continually seeks to develop and expand the leadership and collective action of day laborers city wide. The organization creates alternative market interventions in the unregulated day labor sector that improve economic and social conditions for low-income, immigrant workers while building a grassroots movement for immigrant worker rights.

Founded in 2000 by women day laborers, the Latino Union of Chicago collaborates with low-income immigrant workers to develop the tools necessary to collectively improve social and economic conditions. The organization develops grassroots leadership from within the immigrant corner day laborer community, creates feasible alternatives that address the injustices immigrant workers face in Chicagoland, and works to build the broader grassroots movement for immigrant workers' rights. As the only organization that works with Chicagoland corner day laborers, the Latino Union's membership comprises the most vulnerable sector of the immigrant worker community. Workers who congregate on street corners where employers hire them on a temporary basis encounter situations of extreme poverty, exclusion by community, language barriers, and lack of designated physical spaces in which to congregate to find work, along with physical and verbal abuse. Adding to these challenges associated with day labor across the country, a national study published by UIC and UCLA cited the Midwest as the worst region in the country for corner day labor. Sixty-six percent of such workers experience theft of wages at least once in a two month period while one third will experience a serious workplace injury in the course of one year. Building on a successful history of organizing activity which led to the passing of various legislative changes and the establishment in 2004 of the first Workers' Center for street corner day laborers in the Midwest, the Latino Union continues to focus on addressing the sources of poverty through internal community organizing and education constantly backed by leadership development within the immigrant community.


About the Chicago Coffee Confederation.
The Café Chicago project will collaborate with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, a group of small batch coffee roasters who support fair trade economic relationships and social justice movements and creative work. The Confederation’s Principles are:
- Through the roasting of coffee, provide a decent hourly wage to the roaster.
- Raise funds beyond wages, at least once per year, for a social or creative cause that seeks change in the world.
- Support sustainable environmental and human practices by roasting and selling beans that are at least fair trade and organic. Preference is given to buying beans from cooperatives whose work is part of a movement towards liberation.
- Where feasible and needed, work together to support the confederation and each other’s work (i.e., ordering beans and bags in bulk to reduce costs, referring customers to each other based on geographical closeness)
The CCC will provide initial technical coffee roasting and distribution training to day laborers who will oversee the preparation, packaging, and distribution of fair trade organic coffee. Workers capacitated to manage operations facilitate future trainings for additional day laborers, low-income workers, and youth to both conduct the operations of Café Chicago and also gain job training skills transferable to other coffee businesses and cooperatives.