FROM JAIL TO JAVA
Coffee shop serves up job skills alongside caffeine in a unique social enterprise,
Klink: the sound of a cell door closing, onomatopoeia synonymous with jail; the name of a social enterprise filled with bulging bags of fragrant coffee, a place giving former federal inmates a second chance.
“People coming out of prison are far less likely to reoffend if they have employment,” says KLINK Coffee’s director, Jennifer Macko. “There are a lot of things employment ties into: it ties into stable housing; it ties into being able to support their family and being able to be in a safer neighbourhood.”
According to the John Howard Society, the unemployment rate for criminal offenders in Canada is above 40 per cent — more than five times the national average. To combat this pervasive problem and help former inmates reintegrate into society, KLINK, which distributes Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee, offers job training as well as work placements at a Toronto coffee roastery, a café and its Danforth Ave. office. More than 40 people have been through the program since its inception in 2013.
The social enterprise is supported through coffee sales, the John Howard Society and the United Way.
“We invest in social enterprises,” says Anne Jamieson, senior manager of the United Way’s Toronto Enterprise Fund (TEF). “Specifically the kinds of enterprises that are employing people who are marginalized or who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.” From a print shop staffed by at-risk youth to a bicycle repair shop run by homeless people, the United Way currently funds 17 such social enterprises through the TEF.
“Our purpose is to help people who want to work and can’t find work to really get that experience and that training that they need to reconnect to the labour market,” Jamieson says.
For Joanne Amos’s family, KLINK proved to be a lifesaver. Soon after Amos’s husband was incarcerated in 2010, she and her three children ended up in a homeless shelter.
“When people say, ‘Oh, you know, I could never be homeless,’ I always look at them and think, ‘You’re probably four months in savings away from being homeless,’ ” she says.
“I was one of those people,” she adds. “I thought it could never happen to me — until it did.”
Released in 2013, Amos’s husband became one of the first people to go through the KLINK program.
“It’s very hard for guys when they’re getting out to have this huge chunk of time in a resume,” Amos says.
“What do you say? I was in prison? You might as well just say, ‘Don’t hire me.’ ”
At KLINK, her husband learned computer, resume-writing and interview skills. He now has a steady job in the construction industry. “If it weren’t for KLINK, he never would be where he is now — we never would be in the house we’re in now,” she said.
Amos herself worked in KLINK’s sales department for more than a year before becoming an outreach worker at the John Howard Society.
“You drink coffee every single day,” Amos says. “Imagine drinking a coffee where you actually change people’s lives.”