Hello! We’re Jane and Francois, the husband and wife team behind Long Street Coffee.
We love brewing, drinking, and serving great coffee. We are also passionate about refugee rights and want to help young refugees and asylum seekers fulfill their potential by providing them with real employment opportunities.

 

We are both baristas and have 20 years combined experience in the hospitality industry. Long Street is our plan to share our love and knowledge of coffee making with refugees who are eager to learn about coffee and to find work in the industry.


We named our café after a well-known street in Cape Town, South Africa. Long Street is a vibrant, culturally diverse place. We hope the café will have a similar energy and will likewise be a celebration of multiculturalism.


Refugees are not a burden, but an asset to our society. They simply need the same thing we all do, a fair go. Long Street will help young refugees find their feet by providing them with a six-month paid traineeship in the hospitality industry.
For most of our trainees, this will be their first job in Australia, and it will be a vital stepping stone to future study or employment opportunities. After the six-month traineeship, we will assist our graduates in securing ongoing employment.
 
                   



Both Jane and Francois have had experience as volunteers working with the refugee community in Collingwood. Jane first began working with refugees in 2010 as a volunteer English teacher to refugees living in the commission housing flats. Not long afterwards, Francois started teaching hospitality skills to young migrants and refugees. Jane was particularly inspired by one of her students, Suad, who is pictured below. A hard working mother of three young children, Suad and her husband fled in fear of the violence taking place in their own country. They left feeling hopeful that they would be able to make a safe and happy home in Australia for their three children.



Volunteering with people from refugee backgrounds, it soon became clear to both us both that despite working really hard, many refugees living in Australia do not have the same opportunities as people who were born here.
Working in hospitality, we’ve seen numerous young people from refugee backgrounds walk in to cafes looking for work, only for their resume to end up in the bin. Little to no Australian work experience, less-than-perfect English language skills, and often a lack of self-confidence, are usually the reasons for this. As everyone can understand, it’s very difficult to feel a sense of belonging, to make friends, and to be self-sufficient when you don’t have a job.





Long Street started to become a reality in January 2014 when we set up our first pop-up cafe at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in Melbourne. With over 15,000 tickets sold and a stellar international line-up, we certainly had our work cut out for us. We employed two young refugees, Dawa, who is from Tibet, and Esther who is from Burma. For both Dawa and Esther, the Long Street pop up was the first time they had worked in Australia. Together we made and sold over hundreds of coffees (and lots of iced tea!) to thirsty festivalgoers and braved the 43 degree Melbourne summer heat in the process. We witnessed both of our trainees make huge progress in a very short period of time. After the success of Laneway, the news began to spread and not long afterwards, we were asked by Arts House Melbourne to run a second pop-up cafe at the Melbourne Festival of Live Art (FOLA). A collaboration between the City of Melbourne’s Arts House, Theatre Works, and Footscray Community Arts Centre, FOLA was a feast for the senses and as the performances kicked off at 9am, so did Long Street Coffee.
We brewed all day and ensured that Melbourne art lovers were kept well-caffeinated.     



               
 
              
Doing the pop-ups proved to us that people loved Long Street Coffee and what we represented.  We began searching for a permanent space and almost twelve months later, we found one!


                        

Down a little laneway in Richmond, in what was formerly a garage, stands our cafe-in-the-making. The journey thus far has been a tough one. Yet, we always hoped that once we were able to secure a permanent home for Long Street, we would also be able build a community of supporters.

                         

Our dream is that Long Street will come to play an important role in building a more progressive and inclusive Australia, a place where asylum seekers and refugees feel welcome. We think that when the person making your coffee just so happens to be a refugee, it might make it a little bit harder for people to believe the negative stereotypes of so-called boat people. We know that there are many people out there who also believe that we need to do more to give refugee and asylum seekers a fair go. If that’s you, then please support us! If you have any questions about the campaign or our plans for the café, please get in touch.
[email protected]


We've got some pretty sweet rewards to say a huge thank you to all of our supporters!

Our T Shirts and Totes are supplied by Das Automat and are designed by a Melbourne-based street artists and illustrator, Harley Jones.

The Long Street KeepCups are pretty sweet, too, and will be a good way for us to know who to give special thanks to when you bring it into the cafe.

Also, there are a lot of free coffees to be had!





Shipping within Australia is included in the cost of the reward. If you're in Melbourne, we'll probably be delivering a parcel to your house by pushy! Any international supporters (wow, that would be cool), please contact us at [email protected] to chat about postage.

We are asking for the bare minimum we need to run our first training program and get the doors open. Any funds raised over our goal, will go directly to fitting out a kitchen. It would be great to start serving food from day one!

We already own the most expensive piece of equipment, the coffee machine. We have been doing as much of the work ourselves as possible, and will continue to do so. Thanks to the help of family and friends, we'll be doing the fit out on a shoestring budget.

Long Street will face even greater challenges than the average small business. As with any social enterprise, we need to juggle both our social goals and the financial demands of the business.
We are realistic about the challenges we face, and in addition to our many years of experience managing cafes, we have a strong team of business advisers supporting us.

One significant challenge is the fact that we will be employing people who are essentially not work ready. This will be difficult both in terms of managing finances and the time and effort required to provide sufficient training, on and off the job. Our training program will need to ensure our trainees are learning at a pace that they are comfortable with and that also meets the demands of the business. Getting the balance right will be tricky.

Furthermore, many of the young people we will be working with will have had very traumatic experiences. It is vital that we work hard to ensure that we create an environment where they feel safe and confident and able to learn.

Overall, the greatest challenge and the real measure of our success, will be meeting our objectives of a high retention rate and a high percentage of our graduates securing employment after completing training at Long Street.

We have a solid budget and realistic projected earnings and expenditure. We are well-supported and confident that the challenges we will face will not prevent Long Street Coffee from being successful.