From Crisis to Coffee
Founder of StreetSmart Australia and the annual CafeSmart campaign, Adam Robinson reflects on a decade and a half of impact, good coffee, and social change….
Early in 2011 Australia’s economy suffered its biggest quarterly contraction since the recession of the early 1990s. Sitting down with our DineSmart restaurant campaign supporters in Melbourne CBD I was hearing that lunch trade had ended and it was tough going, and may not get better any time soon. One restaurant owner told me ‘…everyone is still getting a coffee, you should try partnering with cafes’. It’s often your supporters who have the best ideas!
“That conversation got me thinking. Melbourne was at the forefront of the specialty coffee movement and we already had a number of great café partners running DineSmart, but it wasn’t a natural fit…how could we find the right model for cafes, that could scale rapidly?”
So, I met with a few café owners. Salvatore Malatesta at ST. ALi, a long time DineSmart partner, was the first I chatted to and immediately said he’d be in and would support a new concept, so we explored ideas. I then spoke to Joanne Feehan at Allpress about how coffee roasters could get involved, and we decided roasters would be key to our scaling the idea.
These conversations, and others, gave me enough confidence to refine the ideas and launch CafeSmart a few months later.
The Cafe as a 'Third Space' for community, connection, and social change
“Cafes are all about community, they are hubs of activity where people come to meet, and they give us a sense of belonging and connection as we meet friends or just sit and watch the world go by. Their owners and staff see the world at street level and understand the rhythms of place and people.”
The power of CafeSmart has been the simplicity of the model, $1 from every coffee sold on one day of the year, matched with local impact (oh, and some awesome branding by Zoran at CLEAR). Understanding this and doubling down on our localised impact strategy, from our DineSmart campaign, was a great fit.
Through our community grants program, donations from cafes stay local, often supporting services within 500m of the cafes front door. It’s a powerful collaboration model. Our grants back local community leaders to find the best responses, in their community, for the challenges locals face. CafeSmart is all about rallying support to help strengthen these communities to be resilient and be able to respond to local needs.
Long term roaster partners and advocates Single O pose in Sydney for their signature CafeSmart photo in 2023
A 15 year journey of collaboration and collective generosity
It takes a village. From partners such as Broadsheet, Vitasoy, La Marzocco and CoffeeTools to our champion coffee roasters, both running the campaign in their cafes and supporting their wholesale customers to get involved, to the smallest hole in the wall cafe.
“CafeSmart is still here after 15 years because of the passionate people who get involved, it’s a huge collective effort. We are a tiny team here at StreetSmart, so our partnerships with the hundreds of small business owners, along with enthusiastic staff, is what drives the campaign. In total over 3300 cafes and roasters have played their part.”
Photo: Long term CafeSmart partners, Three Blue Ducks
Over the 15 years we’ve endured some tough economic headwinds, and the COVID pandemic and lockdowns, but even then, with little preparation, cafes across Australia still stepped up and raised $80,000 in 2020. Ironically the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vital role that smaller, grassroots charities, embedded in community, play as a first place that people go when faced with hardship.
Fundraising isn’t an easy gig, you need people to jump onboard and be your cheerleaders and champions, it’s definitely a team sport. Luckily along the way CafeSmart has had plenty and many have been with us for 15 years, resulting in $2.2 million in community grants for smaller grassroots organisations, funding Neighbourhood Centres, Women and Children’s Refuges, Foodbanks and Community Pantries, Emergency Relief providers and so much more.
Where you can Drink Coffee and Do Good on Friday Aug 8th
Coffee lovers, now’s your time to Drink Coffee and Do Good, so drink up on Friday 8th of August, or you can just as easily pay your coffee forward here.
Philanthropists – we’d love to work with you to match and scale our impact. We’ll be making 100+ community grants in regional and metro communities across Australia that help to tackle homelessness at a grassroots level. Just reach out to partners@streetsmartaustralia.org.
