Help Wildflyer Coffee soar to St. Paul!
With your support, we'll raise the $25,000 needed to help us open our second location, allowing us to double the number of youth we can provide supportive employment to each year.
Additional benefits are:
- Improve sustainability through fundraising and market share
- Increase staff retention and leadership development
- Creating a safe space to provide public-facing, low-barrier mental health, and chemical dependency services
What we're about
Hi! I'm Carley Kammerer, Co-founder and Executive Director of Wildflyer Coffee.
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I’m a licensed social worker with nearly a decade of experience working with youth going through housing instability and homelessness. Early in my career, I noticed a common theme: my clients were great at getting jobs, but they faced too many barriers to staying employed long-term. Without consistent income, they often weren’t able to keep their housing and cycled in and out of homelessness.
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In 2017, I co-founded Wildflyer Coffee as a small cart serving coffee at farmers' markets as a solution to this problem. Over time, we built a following and proved that cultivating employment and life skills in our young people correlated with them being able to leave homelessness.
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In December 2020, we opened our first coffee shop in South Minneapolis with the help of Indiegogo. Now, we’re ready to do it again, in St. Paul! To make this dream a reality, we need to raise $175,000.
Right now, Wildflyer Coffee has an exciting opportunity to partner with RS EDEN, a local community organization, and open a second storefront location in St. Paul, MN. Prior to the pandemic, RS EDEN operated a coffee shop inside their housing unit but now their goal is to partner with us to reopen the space as a Wildflyer location. This gives us the chance to expand our vision at a fraction of the cost and time that we’d normally need for a project like this.
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This is the most efficient way to grow our mission while preserving the funding we’ve already set aside for our youth program. We’re receiving more youth applications and requests for services than ever, so we need more space to accommodate that demand. Over 13,000 youth experience homelessness across Minnesota, so the time is right to increase our capacity and continue to create opportunities for them. Simply put, we can’t afford to pass this up.
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We’ve intentionally positioned Wildflyer Coffee to grow in this way since the beginning: building a roster of vendors critical to operating our business, investing in a skilled leadership team, and creating a program model that can be easily replicated in new locations. The foundation is in place and with this opportunity, we are ready to capitalize on our vision.
Cost & Rewards
The $175,000 we need to raise covers the costs for:
Capital and renovations
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To begin this project, we must secure a minimum of $75,000 to renovate the store with Wildflyer branding, replace some faulty equipment, and secure the inventory required to open our doors.
Staffing expansion and youth employment
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We need to secure $50,000 to cover the additional staffing costs of opening a second shop while continuing to run the Minnehaha Ave location. Before the shop opens and begins to generate income, we will need to hire and train additional staff members to help open the St. Paul store.
Sustainability and future growth
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The final part of our fundraising plan is to secure $50,000 of working capital to cover operating expenses for the St. Paul location in early 2023. We need to ensure our organization can accommodate the increased expenses of a larger youth program as we launch the shop.
Due to the generosity of private donors and foundations, we have already raised $150,000. Now, we need to raise $25,000 more! Yes, you'll get amazing perks when you donate. Think exclusive Wildflyer merch and some delicious coffee. But most importantly, you'll get the satisfaction of knowing you're ending youth homelessness across the Twin Cities.
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The Impact
This expansion will, most importantly, allow Wildflyer Coffee to double the number of youth served each year. Right now, we can only work with about 30 youth employees each year. A new location would let us expand that to 60. Beyond serving more youth, this location will shorten the travel time for our youth staying in St. Paul, who currently have to commute to our shop in Minneapolis.
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In 2021, our first year in business at the Minnehaha Ave location, we employed fourteen young people. This year we will serve 25-30 youth in our Work and Life Skills Training Program. To date, our outcomes are:
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Overwhelmingly, our graduates report that Wildflyer has helped them build confidence, develop their job skills, remove some of the barriers to finding housing, and renew their hope for the future. We’re ready to improve these outcomes by expanding to a second location, where we can provide additional supportive services through better case management and community partnerships.
Risks & Challenges
While we have already proven success by opening our first shop (in the midst of COVID, no less!), we’ve never opened a second shop, nor run two businesses in two cities at once. There will undoubtedly be hurdles as we learn to manage two separate shops, as well as run multiple youth cohorts simultaneously at both locations.
However, we feel more than ready to take on these challenges. We believe we are well suited to the task because:
- We’ll be taking over a pre-existing coffee shop that had a dedicated customer base already. From our experience at our first location, in the former Peace Coffee retail space, we have found this to be invaluable in generating success.
- Our partnership with RS EDEN, an extremely successful, well-established non-profit in the Twin Cities, will increase the services and support we can offer our youth and the community.
- We already have a track record of success, demonstrated by our growth from the coffee cart to the coffee shop, where we have seen sales and the number of youth employed nearly double from 2021 to 2022.
- Our dedicated leadership team and staff, perhaps our best asset!
Ways To Help
Can't donate? That's okay, here are a few other ways to help!
Tell your friends
Please share our campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram! We need all the exposure we can get. If you're feeling extra excited, we’d love it if you took the time to email this Indiegogo page out to those in your network. The buttons to share via social media or email are at the top of the page.
Media coverage
Know anyone in the media? Have them connect with us at contact@wildflyercoffee.com if they want to do a story on us. Let's make some noise!
Party with us
Join us at our launch parties! We're going to be celebrating in a few cities around Minnesota, check the schedule below and drag a few of your friends along.
Visit out shop
We’re open every day, 7 am-6 pm at 3262 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis! Serving you espresso-based drinks, pastries from our friends at Honey & Rye, tea, and coffee!
Media Coverage
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