New cafe to offer coffee and second chances. Shop to open later this year on Hilltop

A Tacoma-based coffee roaster has set out to prove that our daily routine can push positive change in the city it serves by lifting up the people who most need a boost.

Civic Roasters has been purveying its coffee, roasted in a shared facility in Auburn, online and at pop-up markets since 2018. More recently, Liftbridge Coffee at Courthouse Square and ALMA have included the brand in their rotating lineups. Later this year, the company — with financial help, the founders hope, from the community — will open a cafe and roastery at 1601 6th Ave. in Hilltop.

Social entrepreneurship lies at the heart of Civic, which donates a portion of bag sales to local nonprofits and community groups. So far, proceeds have benefited organizations including United Way of Pierce County, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, the 50-year-old Black Prisoners Caucus and Community Passageways, which engages local youth facing criminal convictions to reconnect them with their communities.

At the retail storefront, Civic will be able to fulfill an important goal that reaches beyond the beauty of a well-brewed cup: to train and employ formerly incarcerated women.

“Our mission is: We seek to cultivate healthy neighborhoods by strengthening communities,” said founder Benita Ki, who left her career in nonprofits to focus on Civic full-time. “We are looking to invite people to think about their everyday product and know that it’s doing good in the city.”

Friends Kyle and Alicia Bradshaw joined Ki as co-owners last year.

The proportion of women in U.S. jails and prisons has increased dramatically in the past three decades from about 10 percent in 1983 to 25 percent in 2017, according to a report from Vera Institute of Justice. In Washington state, around 400 women were admitted annually to jails or prisons in the early 1970s compared to more than 3,000 by the mid-2010s.

In their first year after release, King County women reported securing employment as one of their biggest challenges in a 2019 study from Seattle University’s Crime and Justice Research Center.

BECOMING A TACOMA COFFEE SHOP

After graduating from the University of Puget Sound, Ki worked for a faith-based leadership program at Pacific Lutheran University and later led a health clinic in Hilltop. She began talking with friends about starting something of their own.

“What would it look like to re-imagine how we think about alleviating poverty?” she recalled in an interview with The News Tribune. “Civic was born out of an idea of using business, of using social entrepreneurship, to do something different.”

Having a public-facing, everyday connection point was also important. Puyallup’s Farm 12, the restaurant and event venue connected to Step by Step, a nonprofit that supports at-risk women and mothers, is a local example of a similar approach.

They landed on coffee precisely because of its universality. It is, after all, the most popular beverage in the world. From a business perspective, said Ki, it also offers low overhead. She and her two co-founders had all worked in coffee shops at one time or another and, naturally, loved drinking the stuff.

Like fellow Tacoma coffee roasters (and soon, neighbors) Manifesto, Bluebeard and Valhalla, Civic sources beans through cooperatives that ensure fair labor practices, living wages and environmental security. Packaged in modest brown paper bags, the medium to light roasts are predominantly single-origin from Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Ethiopia and Vietnam.

The team also hopes to educate casual coffee drinkers on the importance of these sustainable supply chains.

“To actually pay for fair, ethically sourced coffee costs a lot, and it’s going to continue to cost a lot,” said Bradshaw.

Following those early days of tinkering on a Huky 500 roaster, Ki and Co. upgraded to Roasterworks in Auburn, from which many microroasters have emerged. Their roasts have “improved over time,” admitted Ki. “We’ll take a philosophy of certain folks and roast profiles, try them out, and say, ‘How can we make this better?’”

Locally, they view Olympia Coffee, a Certified B Corporation, and Boon Boona Coffee, which sources only African beans, as role models in both taste profiles and sourcing.

For the Hilltop cafe, they have a commercial Diedrich roaster waiting for when they have the funds to buy it — used and at a discount, “through a crazy bunch of circumstances and, I don’t know, divine circumstances,” said Bradshaw.

CIVIC ROASTERS ON HILLTOP

Civic embraced a faster pace in 2021, joining the Tacoma Sunday Market as a regular vendor. In March, readers of The News Tribune named the upstart one of the best coffee roasters in Tacoma and Pierce County.

Meanwhile, Ki graduated from two local entrepreneurship programs — the Pierce County Business Accelerator Program and Spaceworks — which provide resources such as a business coach and an accountant as well as matching grants.

The trio took turns pouring at other events such as the Rain or Shine Community Market and fundraisers for local nonprofits including L’Arche Tahoma Hope Community, which supports people with disabilities, and Guadalupe House, a transitional housing program.

In searching for their own space, they landed on the vacant Hilltop storefront through Morningside, an Olympia-based organization that supports people with disabilities in securing employment and self-sufficiency. The two entities will share the building near the split of Sixth and Division, where Hilltop meets the North End.

Noting the historical implications of this divide — of redlining that kept Black Tacomans from buying houses in certain neighborhoods for decades — Bradshaw pointed to Civic’s logo, designed by Ki.

Drawn in thin black lines, it shows a mountain as a nod to Mount Rainier, and geometric buildings on either side of a bridge, evoking the Morgan Murray connecting downtown to the Tideflats. She hopes it feels somewhat universal, “because what Civic is and represents isn’t exclusive to Tacoma, and the hope is that community engagement and investment could resonate with people in other places.”

At the cafe, added Bradshaw, “Civic wants to be a place of bridging, between history and the present, between different people.”

There is a need for re-entry resources in Pierce County, where from 2014 to 2020 more than 1,100 prisoners annually were released, according to a county-by-county breakdown from the state Department of Corrections. A separate report correlating 2017-2020 releases to Pierce County with U.S. Census Bureau address information revealed that a density of them returned to Tacoma’s Hilltop, South End and Eastside neighborhoods.

Civic quietly launched its crowdfunding campaign in April, garnering $55,000 of a $150,000 goal as of this printing. Every dollar amount will receive a reward in return, starting at a sticker and social media shoutout for $10-$30 to a swag bundle and one 12-ounce bag of coffee every month for a year for $500-$1,000.

With an architect on the buildout and four years of roasting under their belt, the Civic team anticipates a late 2022 opening. A majority of the space will be dedicated to production, increasing wholesale capacity, while the retail side will offer views into that process and room to enjoy a cup or two.

“We really believe this is something that a lot of people hold, and we want them to have a stake in it just as much as we do,” said Bradshaw.

“We don’t see this as our idea — it’s the city’s,” said Ki. “I never wanted to die on this hill because I wanted to open a coffee shop. My take is to re-imagine ways for people on the margins to have a better life.”

CIVIC ROASTERS

▪ 1601 6th Ave., Tacoma, civicroasters.com

▪ Details: roastery and cafe targeting late 2022 opening

▪ Try Now: order coffee online ($15-$17.50 for 12-ounce bags, $40 for a pack of three, or $14 each with subscription); follow instagram.com/civicroasters for their next pop-up event

▪ Support: civicroasters.com/crowdfunding