Giving Mom the Morning Off

Almost every Saturday morning since Curt's Cafe opened, Mike from the neighborhood, and his three over-the-top cute kids have been coming to the Cafe -- usually in their pajamas -- for breakfast!

Today, the week before Christmas, there is a special Daddy and Me breakfast., so Owen, 7, Riley, 4 and little Reese, who is 2 but insists she is 3 1/2, came in for a feast of chocolate chip pancakes, while their dad drank his Milky Way Latte. Every other week, the kids' standard fare is Coco Puffs, and there is a big box of the sweet stuff waiting behind the counter for them every time come in.

"We come to Curt's because it's not just kid friendly, it's everything friendly," says Mike. "We wake up on Saturdays and everyone just wants to go to Curt's!

A moment in the life of Susan our Executive Director

"I got a call at 11 p.m. last week from one of our students who asked if I could find some blankets for him. He is 20 years old and recently homeless – he said he had a bad fight with a sister and his mother had to “put him out” (sounds like what you do to a dog for a few hours, not a young man…but that is the terminology he used). When I asked how many he needed he said 8. I tried to go back to sleep but had to wonder why 8 young adults needed blankets to get trough the night.

At Curt’s Café we teach at-risk young adults aged 15 to 24 life and job skills and then place them in jobs and continue to mentor them. This summer we had 9 students and 6 were homeless. These were all young men, with no place to lay their heads, with little education, no jobs and no money. We are only able to provide two meals a day for them and 8 hours of training. But they have to survive the other 16 hours on the streets, and our gangs are clearly the ones opening their doors to them and keeping them safe and warm.

In Evanston we have adult homeless shelters and a few programs for homeless young adults, but the shelters specifically for young adults have long waiting lists. So what do they do at night when it's 32 degrees outside? Where do they go if they can’t afford a bus or train pass to run the rails all night and stay warm?

The volunteers at the Café found the student eight blankets within an hour and this morning at 6:30 a.m. I received a text from our student saying, “Thanks for everything."

8 blankets, that's easy. But they need so much more!"

It's All About The Soup!

We thought we had seen Justin smile before. 

He's been at Curt's for about a month now and he's posed for dozens of pictures for our Facebook page. He has even been interviewed by WGN News for a story they did on the Cafe. He was shown learning to cook up an omelet and then spoke directly into the camera and said that from the very first day he walked into Curt's it felt like home.

But yesterday we saw a look come across Justin's face that was a beautiful mixture of pride and joy during an exchange with a customer that caught Justin off guard. 

But let's back up. A few hours before Justin found himself standing at one of our tables talking to a lady eating a bowl of cream of broccoli soup, Justin was back in the kitchen next to a hot stove cooking up breakfast wraps, tuscan sandwiches and piping hot bowls of oatmeal.

We usually have a chef on hand to train our students, or Susan our Executive Director stands over the students' shoulder while they chop vegetables, make sandwiches and cook bacon. But on this morning the chef couldn't make it in, and Susan had her hands full preparing a big catering order that needed to get out the door. 

So Justin was our cook. He was manning the stove all by himself and responsible for preparing all the hot food for the Cafe. He had been working up to this point, spending many shifts working side by side with the cook. But today he was on his own, and all morning he was focused and efficient in his new position. 

But there's more to it. Another one of the cook's responsibilities was to prepare a soup for lunch, and Justin took this on as well. He made his own version of a cream-filled soup, chocked-full of vegetables and around noon he started to ladle out bowls of his creation as the orders came pouring in.

One of his bowls was delivered to a table of two gals busy chatting away. A few minutes later when one of our volunteers approached the table to see if the women needed anything else, she asked....

"So how is the soup?"

The customer's response was so immediate and so positive, it demanded grabbing Justin away from the kitchen for just a moment so he could hear the words coming out of her mouth. Justin approached the table awkwardly, and tentatively asked about the soup. And here's what that lady said, as she looked directly into Justin's eyes.

"This is the best bowl of soup I have ever had."

That's when Justin's mouth turned into a full on smile, a toothy grin with a genuine look of pride and joy, and a sense of accomplishment for a job well done!

Graduation Day for Vance

Our student Vance, the guy with dreadlocks behind the counter taking orders and making lattes all these months, has "graduated" and been placed in a job doing food service at Northwestern University. 

We gave Vance a send off recently with a cake and a tool box filled with lots of new tools. Vance hopes to do something mechanical one day and own his own business. We hope the tool box, and all the life tools he learned around Curt's Cafe, will give him a step up towards making his dream a reality. 

Vance was a hard worker and a natural leader and we all believe in him. So do his peers. On his final day at Curt's we all sat with Vance in a circle and the other students, social work volunteers and Susan took turns telling Vance what they admired about him. It really was touching to listen to the other students say they looked up to Vance and appreciated all the help he gave them when they were new at Curt's. 

When it was Vance's turn, he said that one of the things he learned at Curt's was to do things even if he didn't get something out of it -- going the extra step for the customer, teaching another student how to do something, keeping his cool with difficult customers. 

We are going to miss Vance, but he has promised to come back to the Cafe on Saturdays, his day off, once in a while, to continue to mentor other students.