Brewed awakening bestows barista’s confidence

There is a particular fiction that attaches itself to the figure of the young unemployed person in contemporary Britain — that what stands between them and a working life is some deficiency of attitude, a failure of “resilience” or “grit”. 

AmyJayne Redford, who is 21 and lives in Hackney, would seem at first glance to disprove the thesis simply by existing: shy to the point of paralysis as a teenager, uncertain of what she wanted, unable for two years to convert applications into employment, she is now to be found pulling shots of espresso at a café on Kensington High Street, three hours of bus travel away from her family home.

What changed was her encounter with an organisation called Well Grounded, a social enterprise founded in Shoreditch in 2016 by Eve Wagg, who had left the charity sector with what she describes as a desire to address “the cycle of unemployment where it’s hard to get a job because you can’t get experience but it’s hard to get experience if you can’t get a job.” 

Wagg’s response was to identify, in the burgeoning specialty coffee industry, a sector hungry for trained labour and, perhaps not coincidentally, suffused with the aesthetic and ethical preoccupations (sustainability, craft, provenance) that might appeal to young people otherwise inclined to find the retail sector unbearable. 

There are now four Well Grounded academies — two in London, one in Bristol, one in Leeds — and a team of fifteen, and graduates of the programme have logged some four hundred and fifty hours of work experience in Hackney alone.

Latte art

Redford came to the programme by the recommendation of, first, a previous work-experience placement at an organisation called Circle Collective, and then, when retail proved inhospitable, by the job centre itself. 

She finds the doubled recommendation funny. “It was a sign,” she says. 

She had no particular interest in coffee but she is an artist, and the prospect of latte art appealed to her, as did what she calls “the sustainability aspect.” 

One interview by telephone led to an assessment day in the company of around 70 other applicants, from which 12 were selected. 

Ten weeks of training followed, then placements, and finally — the part that gives the Well Grounded model its distinctive shape — a personal reflection project, in which graduates are invited to make something of their experience. 

Redford, who is an artist, made a series of digital illustrations.

“I’ve never been very social,” she says, “so talking to people and being in a front-facing role has done wonders for my confidence, especially when I work solo.” Her manager, a woman called Gee, says she would like two more of her.

Redford’s ambitions have grown. She would like to become a barista trainer. She says she has a fondness for “giving people random facts and teaching them things”.

Well Grounded, for its part, offers further courses — the Coffee Career Accelerator, for those who have completed three months in placement 

Redford’s advice to others in her former position is simply: “Don’t be bummed out by all the no’s and silent treatment from companies. If someone recommends something to you, try it out.” 

She would not, she says, have done this interview at all a year ago. 

That she has done it is perhaps the best argument the programme could make on its own behalf.