The Coffee Project Helping Homeless

Coffee trucks selling £2.50 cups of hot beverages from Tanzania, Columbia and Rwanda will go out on the streets of London this week. But the coffee trucks have a twist: staffed by the ever-growing number of rough sleepers, the scheme by Change Please will give employment to the homeless people of London.

Change Please will give their baristas training as well as the London living wage of £9.15 an hour – not George Osborne’s fake national living wage of £7.20 an hour. It will come as a huge help to the 7,581 rough sleepers in the capital, but also serve as a stepping stone for getting the homeless all around the UK back into work, as Change Please hopes to expand into Bristol, Manchester, Nottingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The not-for-profit organisation’s initiative has received the backing of the Big Issue magazine’s founder, John Bird, as it has many parallels with the Big Issue‘s ideology of having homeless people sell the magazine on the streets. While there will only initially be twelve workers involved with a handful of trucks, it has been confirmed by Cemel Ezel, a social entrepreneur who also backs the operation, that there will be around one hundred people taking part. Meanwhile, Change Please is determined to scout out full-time work in other established coffee chains for their rough sleepers after six months. This would then lead to around 200 people a year off the streets.

Whatever happens, it is clear to all of us at b**p that Change Please’s plans are a huge help to everyone who will benefit and is a real golden nugget in a world that can easily bring us down.