FareStart

Our 13-year-old youth barista program provides homeless and at-risk teens and young adults, ages 16-24, with the opportunity to build a better future for themselves by increasing their ability to change their situation and engage in a supportive community. In the Barista and Customer Service Training Program, youth take the first steps toward rebuilding their lives by receiving 60 hours of classroom life skills and espresso training. Following this, students receive 60 hours of on-the-job training in FareStart’s Café @ 2100 where they work alongside FareStart trainers to build skills including espresso making, cash handling, food preparation, and customer service. During the final week, students focus on creating compelling resumes and developing strong job interview skills. Finally, youth will continue to receive one year of wrap-around services including case management, support services and job development from our partner organization, YouthCare.

For over 20 years, FareStart has helped organizations across the country increase economic mobility for individuals furthest from opportunity and most affected by poverty, homelessness and food insecurity. Our consultants provide training, resources, technical assistance, and support to nonprofits that share a commitment to reducing poverty and hunger through food-based job training social enterprises.

Our consulting team has worked with over 250 clients to help their programs prepare students for gainful employment.

We have supported organizations across more than 150 communities in launching new training programs, scaling existing programs and providing professional development.

The team has applied our proven curriculum for adult and youth culinary job training programs in over 44 states and territories across the country.

Due to the growing need to serve Opportunity Youth, in 2015 FareStart designed and piloted our Youth Culinary and Customer Service Training Program to engage low-income youth who are at-risk of not finishing high school and who need multiple barriers removed in order to move in the right direction. This new program equally focuses on high school graduation and job training while providing support services.

We are partnering with Seattle Public Schools’ Interagency Academy, a network of public alternative high schools in Seattle designed to support the hardest to serve youth in graduating high school. Through this partnership, job training is incorporated into the school day making it easy and accessible for students to attend. When students attend classes in the morning, and job training in the afternoon, they receive school credits toward their diploma and can earn a stipend of up to $20 a day for attendance and active participation. Over eight weeks, youth train in a both a working kitchen and cafe learning culinary skills, barista skills, and customer service along with job readiness skills such as resume creation, interviewing and making a good impression.

Preparing meals for schools, healthcare centers, shelters, Head Start programs, and daycare centers has always been part of FareStart's work. Indeed, since 1992, we have served over 14.6 million meals.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we couldn’t have imagined the impact it would have in our communities and around the world. We shut down our restaurant, cafés and catering. All training programs were paused and staff were redeployed to assist with emergency meal production and delivery. Food insecurity more than doubled in Washington state, unemployment soared and the income equality gap widened.

In response, since March 2020, FareStart has provided nearly 5 million meals to organizations across the Seattle area that serve youth, adults and families who are low-income or experiencing homelessness.