New Sonoma County coffee shop seeks to uplift foster youth
Luke Fleming and Will Carlson have a passion for coffee. And it all began when they met as teenagers in their transitional foster home in Sonoma County.
"He was so hungry that he pretended to eat an eraser. And demanded that we have some food, and I just kind of...I was really afraid at the time, I was in a new city, and when he did that, I immediately felt at home and got to laugh," Carlson told CBS News Bay Area.
One laugh turned into nearly two decades of laughter, as Carlson and Fleming became best friends throughout the years.
They remember their very first job that they got through the foster program, as baristas at a local coffee shop.
"How to be baristas, how to operate a point-of-sale system and unfortunately it's a parking lot now, but that's very much where we got a lot of inspiration from," Carlson said.
Using that inspiration, Carlson and Fleming are now starting Shane's Coffee, their own trailer coffee shop out of Sonoma County.
"Every waking minute outside of the day job of being a social worker, I come home pull 100 shots, do 100 latte arts and just keep that practice going like anything else," Luke Fleming told CBS News Bay Area.
Both Fleming and Carlson attended Sonoma State University and work as clinical social workers full-time. But through all those years, their love for coffee never stopped.
The idea soon dawned on them: How can they turn something as simple as a first job into something more?
"The ability to have a job kind of set, reset everything where it wasn't just that we were troubled youth, or foster youth. All of a sudden, we had jobs, and cars and people who believed in us," Carlson said.
They wanted to find a way to instill that belief into others.
"It's not lost on us as kids who grew up in the foster care system that often receiving services through the foster care system or systems like it that it can be stigmatized," Fleming said.
They want to hire people with disabilities, mental illnesses, and those in the foster care system at Shane's Coffee.
"Shane was a best friend of mine from when I was younger, who unfortunately passed away. He also struggled with some mental health challenges, but Shane kind of had the effect on people where if you walked into a room, everyone felt welcomed," Carlson said.
They began fundraising online and through social media, and decided to bring the idea right where their story began: The Valley of the Moon Children's Foundation in Sonoma County.
"They have gotten this far in their careers, in their lives, being virtually vulnerable in that risk. And we are more than proud of these two young people," Laura Colgate, board president of Valley of the Moon Children's Home Foundation, told CBS News Bay Area.
She added that Carlson and Fleming were not only exceptional in their foster care, but also received scholarships throughout the years.
"We don't just hand you money. They apply, we interview them, we determine the amounts of their scholarship, we follow them through their grades, their GPAs, through their chosen fields, through whatever changes they make," Colgate said.
After Carlson and Fleming's presentation, an anonymous donor was moved by their passion and donated $60,000 to fund their coffee trailer.
"Be in this position of wanting to give back, creating a system by which they can work with the Department of Rehabilitation and train people while giving back to the community and raising funds for Shane's coffee, is nothing short of a miracle in my mind," she said.
Carlson and Fleming plan to open their shop in August next year. They plan to purchase the trailer sometime in January.
"We plan to move around, we plan to go wherever the need for good coffee is," Fleming said.
He added that they are actively looking for business partners in Sonoma County and across the Bay Area, where they can park their trailer in their lots during their open hours.
"We want to be at farmer's markets, we want to be at events, we want to be at festivals. The weekend stuff is where I think we're going to be the most busy because we're going to taking that trailer and go all over the place, all over the Bay Area hopefully and maybe even further," Fleming said.
He added that he hopes their employees, ranging from 10 to 30 staff members, will gain real-life skills and move onto greater things just like they did.
"I'm a former UCLA Bruins master degree," Carlson said.
"And I'm a Berkeley bear," Fleming said.
"If it starts with coffee, great. But if we can get into other things like treatment, therapy, whatever it might be. But the ultimate goal, I think in Shane's legacy, I'm comfortable saying that, we really want to help people," he added.