Elpis is continuing to expand our reach with our reusable coffee bean tote bag program. We’re reaching out to coffee shops throughout our neighboring states, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, to get them familiar with our mission and see if they’re interested in carrying our coffee bean bags.
As we grow our presence throughout the Upper Midwest, we’re also looking to find other coffee shops across the country to help carry our tote bags, and there was no better place for us to start than in Hickory, North Carolina, the hometown of our executive director, Paul Ramsour.
There, we have partnered with Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse, which opened in downtown Hickory back in 2001. Taste Full Beans’ is owned by Scott and Julie Owens, and they’ve created a mission similar to that of Elpis on a grander scale, as they hope ‘to foster a vibrant downtown community, one cup at a time.’
Ramsour had reached out to several Hickory coffee shops, but Taste Full Beans landed as the right choice, as the bean bags and our mission to end youth homelessness spoke to them on a personal level.
“His sister is a customer, so she personally just mentioned it to me at one point,”
Said Julie Ownes. “I think she brought in one of the coffee bean bags, and it looked like something we could definitely carry. We’re not huge into merchandise, but we have some. I looked it up, and I was very interested in the mission. It was very interesting, and it fits in with what we do.”
The Owens’ do their best ot be involved in helping the homeless and at-risk people’s situation in Hickory, the best they can through their business. They partner with the local soup kitchen and Greater Hickory Cooperative Christian Ministry to help those who are coming from hard situations transition into the next phases of their lives.
“Our community does not do anything specific towards youth, but we’re a much smaller community. But anyway, [Elpis] aligns with what we believe, and it was just very interesting.”
As ICE’s illegal raids and crackdowns in the Twin Cities became a national spotlight this winter, the Owens took notice and thought about how they could help support people here and Elpis. They had already had a couple of bag orders that had been popular with customers, but it was essential for them to order as many as they could to help Elpis’s mission and those we supported through ICE’s crackdown in the community.
“My husband and I, we were talking about things, and we were talking about what it would be like to try and do any kind of, whether it’s run a business or any kind of mission work or any of those things in those circumstances. Because everything about your day-to-day is completely disrupted, it’s chaos. We just thought the best thing we could do is order more coffee bags to try to just keep the cash flow going, because we understand when the cash flow stops, that has a terrible impact.”
With the Owens bringing Elpis’s reusable coffee bean tote bags into their community, it has helped spread the word of Elpis’s mission and created a new love for the bags from their customer base. Not every coffee shop is able to carry merchandise, so when a product such as Elpis’s reusable bags came up, it became the best partnership Elpis could have outside the Upper Midwest.
