How Vic’s volunteer-run café operates and promotes environmental sustainability

The Strand sat down with Grace King, co-manager at Caffiends, to learn more about Vic’s volunteer-run café. As a model of environmentally and socially conscious business, how does Caffiends promote the environmental stewardship, fair trade, and social justice?  

The Strand: Can you describe the Caffiends mission? 

Grace King: Caffiends began 12 years ago as a coffee cart in Old Vic called “The Human Bean.” The mission of Caffiends is to create the least waste possible, have the strongest impact on our community, and source things as directly as possible.  

How do you uphold your commitment to, and promotion of, environmental sustainability within the community?

We are known for our signature no-takeout cups program: we don’t have paper cups in our café. We never have. We never will. If a customer wants to take [one of our mugs] outside the café, they can take it anywhere on campus, and bring it back to the crate outside our door at any time.  

Last year we had a volunteer social that was focused on the idea of carbon privilege. So we all talked about the different areas of our lives in which we accrue a carbon footprint and analyzed every area, from the gym to our clothes and our food. We put it together to find out just how much of a carbon footprint we had as individuals. That was a huge step for Caffiends, we’d never talked about it on such a large level. For a fundraiser last year, we stepped away from the Toronto bubble and we donated funds to a group called Raven Trust that funds Indigenous legal cases in protection of the environment. We’re trying to expand our platform more to include an awareness of environmental justice, not just coffee, and this year I’m hoping to continue doing more of the same. 

You’re an entirely volunteer-run cafe. What makes this model work? What are the challenges and benefits of this model?  

We have a body of about 160 or more volunteers at Caffiends that rotate through the café on a weekly basis. Every volunteer has an hour-long shift per week with two other shift mates per hour. So on the half hour, every hour, three shift mates leave and three shift mates come in. This model relies on trust and interest, and willingness to contribute to the Caffiends community. It is a logistical nightmare sometimes with so many people coming in and out of the café. But we’ve developed a bit of a miracle here in the café where we have committed volunteers who truly want to be in the space for at least an hour a week, learn skills, and make friends at the same time.  

From hiring 160 volunteers a semester, to hoping people will bring back their mugs, it is all about trust, and I think it’s kind of beautiful.   

Your products are all ethically sourced and cruelty-free. Can you explain why you have chosen to offer the products that you have?

We have some wonderful suppliers. Chocosol is our coffee provider, and they have Fair-Trade certification and work on a direct trade model where they source the coffee directly from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Our new espresso bean, Detour, works on a direct trade model where they visit the producers, they know who they are, they have direct importation, and they roast in Toronto. [This also goes for] our tea producers. Our baked goods are all vegan, from Sweets from the Earth and Tori’s Bakeshop, both located in Toronto. So everything that we source is from within as small of a radius as we can try [to source]. Coffee obviously doesn’t grow in Canada, so there will always be that [issue]. But we make sure that our coffee roasters are in Toronto, and know their suppliers and their producers well, and treat them with equitable wages and standards.  

The reason we care about this is because not only are we just a café that wants good coffee, I think we’re a café that wants the people who come into the café to leave after their time here with a better stance on their role as an average citizen, as a consumer. My goal is for volunteers to leave with a more rounded perspective on what it means to be an environmentally conscious citizen, because coffee isn’t where it ends. Coffee is where it begins at Caffiends.  

Is there anything else we can expect from the team at Caffiends this year?

This year, we are paying more attention to the language that our volunteers are using in the space. We’re trying to educate them more about using gender-neutral language in customer service. Our training videos have been re-done this summer to include a new segment on this and encourage our volunteers to avoid gendered terms that slip out so easily in customer service. We care about this because we want the space to be safe for everyone. [We want it to be] a place where people do feel like they can stay, learn, and meet people who also care about the environment, equity, and social justice, where they can participate and share their experiences as well.  

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.