Roundup #11 — Community Engagement with Kate Blackman [106]

Just a note, this episode is about coronavirus or COVID-19, so if you don’t want to hear about that, you should skip this episode.

A few days ago, someone told me that 144 baristas in Kansas City lost their jobs. This is self-reported data, so it’s wholly unscientific, but it led me down a pathway to try to figure out how many baristas have lost their jobs. Again, this is unscientific, but if you take the population of Kansas City, around 400,000, and then extrapolate the number of baristas who are out of work in KC and apply it to the U.S. population, which is about 327 million, we get almost 100,000 baristas. Once more, this is unscientific, and something I did basically just by cross-multiplying.

As more and more people are laid off, who can baristas turn to for support? Some employers have been great at advocating for their furloughed staff, but other baristas are left in the dark. The Kansas City barista community decided to step in.

Today we’re chatting with Kate Blackman, a fixture in the barista community in Kansas City. She, along with her colleagues Ben White and Jerry Ponzer, organized a community tip pool, dedicated to giving aid to any and all baristas who have been affected by COVID-19. Every week, they do a tip split, and last week, they raised over $5,000 dollars and gave every barista who asked - which turned out to be 172 baristas - $32 dollars. And they’re working to get more folks to give more money.

You can start a community-grown support movement in your city. Kate lays out some of the tools they’ve used to mobilize customers and garner attention in the neighborhoods. Here’s Kate with more: