There’s a coffee shop in Tampa where you can order a latte and change the world.
At Coffee Uniting People, or CUP, the baristas serving cappuccinos and mochas, lattes and espressos are adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, like Down syndrome and autism. For nearly all, it is their first job, their first taste of the kind of independence most teenagers take for granted.
Diane Rodgers heard about CUP through her Down syndrome support group for parents, and she tears up as she talks about something as ordinary as dropping off her 22-year-old son, Russell, for work.
“I’m thrilled. The opportunity for him to have a productive job and be proud for himself …” Rodgers says. “That’s been my dream.”
At CUP, Russell is known as Russ the Bus. He’s a coffee lover himself, and the barista life comes naturally; he and his dad and his best friend have a longstanding routine of spending Saturday mornings at a coffeeshop, although they’ve now moved from Starbucks to CUP.
Diane says Russ is a jokester who loves making people laugh, so mingling with customers and serving up a smile along with a brew fits his personality. Russ says the customers are nice, and he likes earning a paycheck and getting tips.
The shop was started by Greg Jones (MS ’21), an attorney facing a new chapter in life as he approached retirement. Once he latched on to the idea of CUP, that chapter began to write itself.
“You can get a cup of coffee anywhere,” Jones says. “At CUP, that cup of coffee is making a difference in someone’s life.”
Overlooked Workforce
For some CUP employees, the coffeeshop is their first opportunity to earn a paycheck.The unemployment rate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities exceeds 80%, according to the American Psychological Association.
Russ the Bus and his co-workers at CUP were on the wrong side of that number until CUP came along. Jones said CUP employs 45 baristas with Down syndrome, autism and other disabilities and pays standard minimum wage.
The idea for the coffeeshop came to him after a run one morning along Bayshore Boulevard. He and his wife, Laura, had been volunteering for years with a youth baseball league for children with special needs.
“We don’t have anyone in our family who has a disability, so this was all kind of new to us,” Jones recalls. “But it was the best hour or two of our week, by far.”
Jones walked in the door from his run three years ago and told Laura, “I have an idea.”
In the 15 years they had volunteered in the community with organizations that serve disabled citizens, they’d watched many of the special needs children they knew outgrow baseball games or other activities, but not grow into jobs as young adults. Jones thought a coffee shop might work, and Laura – she calls herself the “professional helper” – immediately gave the idea a thumbs up.
The Joneses began talking with people in the community and took CUP for a trial run in popups after church on Sunday and elsewhere in town. The idea was a hit, and CUP chartered as a 501c3 nonprofit in 2022.
And that’s when another lightbulb went off for Jones, and again, he ran it by Laura. Her response, he says, was, “Have you lost your mind?”
Back to School at 60
Chartering a 501c3 is relatively easy, mostly a matter of paperwork.
Building and running a nonprofit? Well, Jones says, he was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, so he decided to go back to school. Son Everett was at UF studying health, education and behavior with a minor in disability studies, so turning to UF seemed logical, and an online certificate in nonprofit leadership caught his eye.
“I still remember that first class. I was in a Zoom with a bunch of 25-year-olds, and it took me a day and a half to figure out the UF online library,” says Jones, who was 60 at the time. “I was older than a majority of my professors. I remember one class, looking at something that looked like hieroglyphics to me and wondering, ‘what have I gotten myself into.’”
Jones says his first thought was that college had passed him by. Then he hit his stride and got the certificate in 2021. The more he learned about nonprofits, the more he wanted to know, and he approached associate professor Angie Lindsey about getting his master’s in nonprofit
leadership.
Lindsey agreed to be his adviser, and instead of a thesis, they decided he would do a project as his capstone: CUP.
“I remember him asking, ‘do you think I can do this?’ I told him there was no doubt in my mind. He had the ability, and the classes gave him the background to build a business plan,” says Lindsey, who is in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences in the College of
Agricultural and Life Sciences, a part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
Jones calls Lindsey his mentor, and she says that makes her “giggle a bit.”
“Greg has been a mentor to me as well, watching him learn and continuing to do more for his community and family,” Lindsey says. “I’m inspired by all he’s done.”
A few months ago, on a visit to Tampa, she got to sip the results of the capstone project, a Cinnamon Delight cold brew at CUP.
A Coffee Community
Jones may be the founder, but a dedicated community sprang up around the shop, and many volunteers have a stake in its success, among them a handful of Gator alums, first and foremost Jones’ son Everett (BS ’20).
“Everybody kind of got in the boat and started rowing in the same direction,” Jones says.
CUP had moved into a downtown space abandoned by another coffeeshop to do its trial run, and then Jones located a storefront for a flagship location on busy South Dale Mabry Highway. Retrofitting the space for a coffeeshop fell to architect Eric Kreher (BS ’79, MA ’83) and designer Catherine Kreher (BA ’82), who were among a dozen professionals and businessowners who refused to be compensated or who donated materials or labor at cost. The coffee is locally roasted by Brisk Coffee Roasters in Ybor City.
When the storefront at 3408 S. Dale Mabry Highway opened, Mayor Jane Castor noted the teamwork and the leadership of “one of our community’s greatest treasures, Mr. Greg Jones” and predicted there would one day be a CUP on every corner.
“Come discover what wonderful, capable people these are,” Castor said. “And get a great cup of coffee, too.”
One Cup at a Time
One of the keys to CUP’s success, Jones says, has been Stephanie Williams, who worked with 18 to 22-year-olds at Pepin Academies, schools for students with learning disabilities. For six years, she had focused on underemployment, finding positions in the community where the skills of her students matched the needs of employers, then assigning one of her 16 job coaches to supervise.
Jones says Williams called him one day out of the blue and asked to work for CUP. He had only just started and told her he couldn’t pay her.
“She told me, ‘I don’t care; I want to do this,’” Jones says.
Williams, now on the payroll, says her job is identifying a recipe for success for the baristas. There’s a tendency, she says, for her students to be reluctant to branch out from the job where they start. Someone who starts at the register may not ever want to leave the register.
“I don’t give them everything all at once. When they get comfortable, I add one more step, then another step and another step,” Williams says. “Now, many of our employees can do their jobs all by themselves.”
Williams keeps watch, noting “panic times” when the shop gets busy, and that’s when she steps in.
“I let them know it’s OK to take it one customer at a time,” Williams says.
And this isn’t like the line at Starbucks, she says.
“Our customers are great. We may make mistakes; it may not be perfect the first time,” Williams says, “but we are building confidence.”
As employees, Williams says the CUP crew can’t be beat. Not one has called in sick and often, the morning crew is waiting when she unlocks the door for the day, eager to get started on the morning coffee rush.
A lot of the employees have older siblings and have watched them go out into the world of work and bring home paychecks.
“Now they feel empowered, too. They have their own money, and they can talk about their job with their siblings and friends,” Williams says.
At CUP, neurotypical and neurodivergent baristas work side by side, Williams says, to avoid the segregation many of the neurodivergent baristas have felt in their journey through the school system. Here, they are part of the “class,” not in the back of the class.
“The world as a whole is becoming so much more accepting of the fact that these people are just like the rest of us,” Williams says. “They just ‘get it’ a different way.”
Hope in a Cup
CUP’s goal is as bold as its coffee. Jones says the intellectually and developmentally challenged workers CUP has hired are a fraction of an untapped workforce: CUP had 51 applications for the first 13 jobs.
“We’d like to open more stores, a lot more stores, to meet this employment need,” says Jones, who is eyeing a location across the bay in Pinellas, and who has had queries about expansion from Orlando, Sarasota, Miami and even Gainesville.
The market for CUP is strong, too. Jones says many customers visit for the cause as much as the coffee. When they find the coffee tastes great, all the better.
“People tell us they want to spend their $5 here instead of another place,” Jones says. “The reality is that you can get a cup of coffee anywhere. At CUP, it’s more than a cup of coffee.”
To learn more about CUP, visit: https://coffeeunitingpeople.org
