Flavours of change: how a sip of coffee led to a new life for Aashifa Hussein

Coffee academy Well Grounded is helping to transform the lives of people with barriers to employment
A first taste of coffee, and a coffee academy, brought Aashifa Hussein to her new career
Well Grounded
Victoria Stewart29 January 2018

Aashifa Hussein was drinking hot chocolate in her favourite cafe – Store Street Espresso – when she noticed an advert pop up on her laptop screen that offered free training to people wanting to work in the coffee industry.

Though unemployed Hussein was fixated on hot chocolate and would not normally have taken notice of an ad relating to an industry she knew nothing about. But only a few minutes earlier she happened to have tasted coffee for the first time, and now thinks the experience flagged something in her brain.

“My friend had been talking about the amazing black filter coffee, so I’d had a sip and I thought it was so bizarre… I still think it is, really, although now I also think it’s great.”

Recently graduated with a degree in education studies at UCL, Hussein had lost her way.

“I wasn’t self confident. I was struggling with just navigating from day to day,” she explains from the Islington branch of Vagabond Coffee shop where she now works as head barista, and is in charge of maintaining coffee quality.

“At university, my goal had been to start trying to provide safe spaces for girls across the world – to give them access to clean water, food, and shelter. I’d come from university, where before graduation I’d been working constantly, and then after graduation this thing of being on my own looking for jobs wasn’t quite working. It was like I just kept going down the same wormhole. I’d lost motivation.”

Step in Well Grounded, a speciality coffee academy and social enterprise that aims to link people looking for work – those with barriers to employment – with what its founder and managing director Eve Wagg describes as “an industry desperately looking for employees and talent”. They run a roster of “predominantly free” programmes, ranging from day-long to four-month-long courses, and have relationships with employers from both the speciality coffee sector – say Vagabond or Notes Espresso – and a corporate contract caterer which sponsors training programmes. “If it’s right for individuals we also have connections with Caffe Nero and Pret a Manger, whose structure might be more suitable for some trainees,” she says.

Before beginning a pilot scheme for Well Grounded in 2016, Wagg had previously spent 12 years working in alternative education in the voluntary sector. Today she believes Well Grounded is here “because coffee is how we’re enabling people to access employment.”

Eve Wagg is the founder and managing director of Well Grounded
Well Grounded

Coffee is perfect, she believes, because “it’s an industry that’s growing exponentially – research from Allegra Strategies predicts there will be 40,000 barista roles coming up in the next six years. That’s a lot of opportunities. Our qualifications make it easier for people to access those, and our graduates who had no experience of working in coffee are now sourcing it, roasting it, making cups of it, and progressing fast.”

Recent graduates come from a range of backgrounds: there’s Tom who now works at Old Spike Roastery in Peckham, 17-year-old Daniel who had no career plans and now works at Bench cafe in Clerkenwell, and Rasha, a refugee from Yemen who, though highly educated, “had to start her life again,” and is currently doing a paid masters with the Italian coffee roasting company, Illy.

“We have an open door policy,” states Wagg, who believes that real change happens “when you’re sitting around a table and listening to a conversation with all those different people in the same room. It’s so powerful, because so often in our lives we are with people who are similar to us.”

Since the inception of her pilot scheme, Well Grounded has trained 112 graduates, all of whom are still working a year later, and since the launch of the academy in August 2017, Wagg is hoping to almost triple the number of people they can training each month.

Well Grounded run mostly free programmes including day-long and four-month-long courses

Aside from technical skills, mentorship, support and what she describes as “soft skills,” are a huge part of the training. “We do lots of practical work that enables people to develop resilience, self awareness, collaboration, and confidence.”

Hussein, meanwhile, was accepted onto the trainee scheme, where she quickly began learning to taste and smell coffee, use speciality equipment and understand customer service. A long process, she also believes it was “totally transformative.”

“Low and behold, Well Grounded came along and it got me out of the house and surrounded by people. It got me motivated again, and it instilled this confidence that I felt I had lost. It made me feel more comfortable in myself and my own ability – not necessarily with coffee, in just being able to learn. I’d felt very stagnant after graduation, and then there was a Phoenix moment where I could start again.”

Hussein also finds it “very rewarding” to physically create something with her hands. “It’s cool that you can see something from start to finish, and enjoy how it grows. Certainly my palate is a lot better than it was last year, and it gets better and better.”

As for her original goal of providing safe spaces for women, she believes the avenue might now be different, “but the idea is still the same”. “What’s important is that I’ve got that motivation back again! I was finding it very difficult to have a conversation with people – strangers – because I didn’t know how to talk to them. But now I find it quite easy. Well Grounded has provided all of us on the course with something to be passionate and enthusiastic about. Because coffee is so much more than just a drink – in coffee there’s community.”

To learn more about Well Grounded’s programmes, visit wellgroundedjobs.co.uk

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