Awaken Coffee expands to ECU: Empowering the differently abled, one cup at a time
As of Feb. 3, the East Carolina University Health Sciences Campus is fully caffeinated again.
Awaken Coffee barista Bridgett Kilcoyne takes an order during the first day of operation at the Health Sciences Campus store.
Awaken Coffee, which offers premium coffee brewed and served by members of the greater Greenville community with intellectual differences, has expanded past its original 14th Street location into the Health Sciences Student Center — a win-win for everyone.
Carol Preston, Awaken’s executive director, started the business with partners in 2023 after seeing the need for opportunities for people who don’t neatly fit into the job market due to intellectual differences. She has a degree in sign language interpreting and a nephew with Down syndrome, which made her more sensitive to the unique challenges of the members of her community who are often overlooked as valuable members of the workforce.
“I’ve always just been on the edge of the special needs world and I always have to have a project,” Preston said.
Awaken Coffee was modeled after other successful coffee restaurants that have two main pillars to their mission: create opportunities and community for their employees and offer world-class coffee to their patrons.
Preston said similar coffee stores in Wilmington and Greensboro are important to Awaken’s story, not only as a template for what is possible, but as active mentors.
“We do a summit each year and share ideas. It’s a movement. Nationwide, the unemployment rate among those with disabilities is almost 80% and that’s not acceptable,” Preston said.
Where other restaurants in the Health Sciences Student Center have had trouble keeping the lights on due to a dip in clientele over the summer break, Awaken’s mission — and business model — might be able to keep the doors open. By not relying solely on sales, Awaken’s leadership can focus on providing opportunities for their employees.
“We received over $77,000 in grants last year and it was 100% local money. There are a lot of good, giving people in Greenville and they’re very kind,” Preston said.
Awaken is just like any other coffee place in offering online ordering, Preston said, but they purposefully don’t have a drive-through window, which would undermine Awaken’s purpose of putting its employees into direct contact with the public.
“We just need customers,” Preston said.
New coffee shop on Health Sciences Campus
Bridget Kilcoyne has called Pitt County home for most of her life. She began working at Awaken when it first opened the 14th Street location in Greenville in April 2023.
“It’s been wonderful. Everybody’s so nice and it’s more like a community than a coffee shop. I feel that it’s helped me to gain confidence and even a little bit of authority. I’ve mainly been on the register so it’s helped with my social skills a lot,” Kilcoyne said.
Kilcoyne said she and her teammates had been on campus before, to offer samples of their coffee in advance of opening the new shop on the Health Sciences Campus. The new location at ECU is where she will likely work most of the time, and the expected increase in clientele will offer new opportunities.
“It is very exciting. I know that we’re going to be a lot more busy; I’ll have to work on my speed,” Kilcoyne said.
Mission
The coffee shop is more than a job, Preston said. For many of her employees, it’s a lifeline.
Preston has some workers who “wouldn’t even get up in the morning” but now are up at 5:30 a.m. to be ready for work at 6:30 a.m. The sense of purpose that having a job at Awaken gives her team members has brought many of them out of a shell and is changing lives.
“We’ve got one guy that lives on his own and wasn’t eating well. He started ordering from a service and now he has this binder of all the meals he likes — it’s a complicated binder but it certainly works for him and now he’s eating better,” Preston said.
Students from ECU’s occupational therapy program listen to a program director at Awaken Coffee’s 14th Street shop as she describes how the organization helps with developmental programs for its employees.
Ryan Manning, another member of the Brew Crew, is impacting those in his community outside of the coffee shop. Preston said the interpersonal skills Manning has developed at Awaken transferred to his church, where he serves as a door greeter.
“He tells women at church that they look beautiful today, sometimes even married women, which might be the only time we hear that. We don’t hear from our husbands,” Preston said. “Our employees are changing the world by changing our community.”
There are many roles for the team that makes Awaken tick. The baristas are known as the Brew Crew and Awaken Allies act as greeters and keep the stores tidy and well stocked. Blend Friends — often the Brew Crew’s parents and family members — lend a helping hand to the professional managers, who have training and experience working with special needs employees.
Preston said a genuine community has grown up around her employees — that many have found their tribe. The COVID-19 pandemic ravaged their connections, but they are back together, socializing outside of work.
For Katie Bagnal, a Connecticut native who now calls Greenville home, working at Awaken is an extension of her mission of empowerment. She lived for a while in Uganda, working at a home for children with intellectual disabilities. After returning to New England, she started managing coffee shops, but something was missing.
Awaken was the perfect marriage of her managerial skills and a dedication to lifting those who need an extra hand.
“It’s a new adventure every day; it’s just filled with joy and there’s so much more purpose,” Bagnal said.
One of Bagnal’s goals is to provide enough training and experience to her employees that they can graduate to other employment opportunities.
“I’ve done a lot of training with them so they have, not just coffee ability, but so they can be an expert barista. The hope is that they can work other places, too,” Bagnal. “It’s going to be really cool for people here to see how capable they are.”
Impact on Pirate Nation
Awaken’s relationship with ECU expands past the Health Sciences Campus. In April 2024, students from the College of Business’ School of Hospitality Leadership partnered with Preston and her team to plan and host a gala to benefit Awaken’s mission.
After the gala, hospitality major Hannah Billings said, after planning the event in the fall of 2023, returning in the spring semester to host the party was a rewarding learning experience.
“I’d spent so much time with the planning process and now would have the opportunity to execute and manage the event doing the things we had talked about,” Billings said.
Ellee Hopkins, a member of the inaugural Doctor of Occupational Therapy class, worked in a coffee shop that employed people with special needs in her hometown of Wilmington. She and her fellow OT students support Awaken’s mission by creating task boxes to sharpen Preston’s employees’ key business skills. Boxes target individual skills, like fluency with money and identifying home hazards, which will likely translate to the coffee shop.
Hopkins, whose doctoral research will focus on empowering those with intellectual disabilities to be more independent by learning how to use public transportation, believes having the Brew Crew interact with students their age will be a huge benefit to everyone.
“Serving, interacting and just doing daily life with people their age can inspire them to break a barrier between ability and disability for everyone,” Hopkins said. “I think there will be an energy boost from their presence.”
Dr. Heather Panczykowski, a professor of occupational therapy, said that having the Awaken employees in the student center will weave them into the fabric of the campus — and hopefully afford students an opportunity to learn from their new peers.
“The nice thing about people in higher education, especially a medical campus, is that they kind of get an education about how to better interact and accept differences in people. They are going to see people of all types throughout their medical training and career,” Panczykowski said.
Panczykowski, who has a differently abled young adult in her family, is hopeful the parents of loved ones who work at Awaken will also benefit from the arrangement by learning how to give their loved ones an opportunity to spread their wings.
“You have to cut the cord to allow for independence, and it’s really hard to let these young adults figure it out without them. Hopefully families will learn how to let these individuals grow, which would be the best gift,” Panczykowski said.