Liam’s Be Cafe Celebrates Grand Opening on World Down Syndrome Day
Moreover, Liam’s Be Cafe addresses the pipeline problem associated with employing people with disabilities. If as many as 80 percent of the population of people, with disabilities, struggle with even entering the workforce, and the remaining 20 percent have been limited by the assumptions of even some of their boldest supporters, gaining important skills, higher wages, and satisfying work is all but off the table.
By Justin Tiemeyer | contributing writer
3/19/2024 - To be published in the 3/21/2024 Ledger
What would you do if you had more time, and money was not a concern? Our better angels say that we would spend more time with our families, travel more, do work that we love, and help people in the most grievous need. Since the coke-powered blast furnaces and steam power looms of the industrial revolution, humanity has put minds, money, and momentum into making things easier, and the result? The vacuum was supposed to be a time-saver, but it ultimately was not, even at 15 times the cost of a broom, and the greatest inventions, smart phones—the Internet, the Internet of things—have actually saved us untold hours of our time, with a catch—all of that time is sunk right back into mindlessly scrolling. The net result? We don’t have time to be together. We don’t have time to be bored. We don’t have time to “be.”
Liam’s Be Cafe, in the Garden Foundation Building, at 1150 North Hudson Street in Lowell, intends to flip the script on this problem. In a brave new world, where many people work alone in an, office in their basement, order coffee online and receive it via contactless pickup, and stare at screens day-in, day-out, Liam’s Be provides an analog alternative. Like its sister location in Ada, Brody’s Be Cafe, picking up a coffee requires patrons to park their car, walk through a door, and make eye contact with another human being. If the only concern for Liam’s Be were keeping up with Starbucks, they would find, like every other competitor, that this is a footrace that cannot be won, but Liam’s Be is playing a different game, and that game is community building. Rachel Stadt is the Executive Director of Liam’s Be and Brody’s Be. “People really want this,” Stadt said. “There’s a need for this.”
By “this,” Stadt means nonprofit coffee shops, or really any businesses, that employ individuals with intellectual disabilities. According to Stadt, about 80 percent of people with disabilities never find meaningful employment, and some, in the field, see that number as a generous figure. Brody’s Be, and the other Be coffee shops — more on this later! — was founded by Jenny Cole, a seventh-grade teacher at Lowell Middle School, whose son, Brody, inspired the whole opus. Brody was born with Down Syndrome, and he was told that he would never do anything more complicated than pushing grocery carts at Meijer.
“What we’re finding is that these individuals can do way more than they’ve ever been given a chance to do,” Stadt said.
Moreover, Liam’s Be Cafe addresses the pipeline problem associated with employing people with disabilities. If as many as 80 percent of the population of people, with disabilities, struggle with even entering the workforce, and the remaining 20 percent have been limited by the assumptions of even some of their boldest supporters, gaining important skills, higher wages, and satisfying work is all but off the table. At Liam’s Be Cafe, the goal is not to make the biggest profit possible or to keep the same business open forever. The goal is to train people with the skills needed to work somewhere else, eventually. “We are helping them to be employable,” Stadt said, “not just at the cafes.”
To say that it is only those with intellectual disabilities who benefit, however, is to remove balance from the equation of Liam’s Be Cafe, which exists just as much to teach the community how to interact with people with special needs, as it does to help those same people find meaningful work. For those without experience interacting with people with disabilites, it is not uncommon to feel starstruck, and some conversations are difficult or awkward, at first. However, Liam’s Be Cafe is an intentional space for different people to come together and realize there is not much of a difference between them, after all.
The staff at Liam’s Be Cafe is divided into Be-Ristas, folks with intellectual disabilities who are learning to work in the service industry, and coaches, who share their experience making coffee and other beverages with the Be-Ristas. However, the breakdown is a bit more complicated than that. For example, Allie Cowden is a Be-Rista at the Brody’s Be location in Ada, but she can run everything without supervision, if needed. When she’s not working at Brody’s Be, she also works at McDonalds in Lowell. It is entirely possible that people like Allie could be the coaches of the future, with the same level of experience working in a coffee shop but with unmatchable insight into the challenges of their peers.
Looking at the broader labor market can be a dismal task, even on a good day. In January of 2024, layoffs soared to the second-highest level since the statistic has been tracked, and that’s following a year that saw record layoffs at Amazon, Disney, and Microsoft among other companies. For a mission-oriented company like Liam’s Be, numbers like that do not make sense, because the nonprofit business’s primary metric for success is the number of people with developmental disabilities it is able to employ. Liam’s Be only came about after Brody’s Be maxed-out its staffing levels at eighteen employees, and Stadt has been working on expanding the brand even further. There are independently-owned Be-branded cafes in Hudsonville (Maggie’s Be) and Grand Haven (Kenzie’s Be), and Stadt has secured a space in East Grand Rapids, where construction has just begun on another Be cafe. So long as there are unemployed and underemployed people with disabilities, Stadt intends to keep expanding. “East Grand Rapids will look different than Lowell,” Stadt said.
Nothing underscores the uniqueness of each Be cafe more than how they arrive upon their names. For Liam’s Be, the board struggled, because they have employed so many amazing people from the greater Lowell area, but they decided upon Liam Doyle, as the namesake for the Lowell location, because he has worked at Brody’s since it opened in 2019, and he is well-known in Lowell. Liam is the only certified Elvis tribute artist in the world with Down syndrome. He goes to church in Lowell, volunteers in Lowell, and can be heard performing Elvis songs for residents at assisted-living facilities like Maple Ridge Manor. There is nobody in the world quite like Liam Doyle, just as there is no cafe in the world quite like Liam’s Be.
Earlier, it was noted that Liam’s Be is playing a different game than other businesses, one about attention, understanding, and community building, where everything revolves around securing employment, training, and a better future for people with intellectual disabilities. Liam’s Be celebrates its grand opening on Thursday, March 21, which is World Down Syndrome Day, with complimentary drinks provided by King Milling Company. The cafe caught the attention of WZZM 13, which published an article on Liam’s Be on Thursday, March 14. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, a third location in East Grand Rapids, overseen by the same board as Brody’s Be in Ada and Liam’s Be in Lowell, broke ground on Monday, March 18, and every time another Be cafe opens its door, another eighteen people with developmental disabilities, give or take, gets an opportunity to find meaningful work that may have been denied them otherwise. Liam’s Be is playing a game to change how society looks at people with disabilities, and the signs suggest that they are winning.
