At the heart of STREAT is a mission to combat youth homelessness and disadvantage, one mouthful at a time. Simply purchasing a meal or coffee [from the collective?] can help a young person participate in the hospitality training STREAT offers, providing them with career skills and, most importantly, a sense of confidence and belonging.
“You get strong diversity in hospitality,” says Rebecca Scott, CEO and co-founder of STREAT. “For young people who have been disadvantaged and excluded for whatever reason, it’s a really good melting pot where people are accepted, no matter where they’ve come from. Another critical thing for us is that hospitality is a field that equally young men or women or young trans people can do. Many industries are quite gendered; hospitality’s not like that.”
In addition to providing support and training for more than 800 young people since its establishment in 2009, STREAT is tackling environmental issues by finding innovative ways to deal with the waste from its cafes. Currently, there are 21 ways of doing good with the cup of coffee you purchase at STREAT, one of which is the training you give to young people. Another is your coffee’s positive impact on the environment, thanks to STREAT’s system for dealing with used coffee grounds.
“One of our key waste products is coffee grounds,” says Scott. “We work with another social enterprise called Reground who collect our waste coffee grounds, which become part of a composting system. Then, both the coffee grounds and the husks can be used as a substrate to grow mushrooms. We harvest those every day and they’re taken into the kitchen.
If you come and have a meal with us, one of the breakfast meals is a mushroom dish, so you’re seeing that full cycle with mushrooms that are being grown onsite from the coffee grounds. We try to keep doing goodness all the way through.” STREAT plans to continue its pursuit of goodness with an expansion strategy in place to commence within the next three years. Whether it’s the invaluable support they provide to young people or the creative lengths they go to in order to reduce their waste, the STREAT team are generating a cycle of goodness with every step they take. And as far as their CEO is concerned, STREAT is just getting started.
