A Pilot Program Teaching Barista Skills to 14-16 Year Olds

For the past three weeks, we’ve been running a very special project that’s close to our hearts. Every Tuesday for the past three weeks, we’ve been running an after-school club teaching barista skills to a group of 14-16-year-old students at Park Community School in Leigh Park.

We first connected with Park two years ago when we started helping them with their social enterprise café at Staunton Country Park. Since then, one of our main goals has been to run a program like this for students, so it’s amazing to see it finally come to life.

This project is especially meaningful to us because the school is in Leigh Park, the most deprived area of Hampshire. Despite the great work the school does, it’s still one of the most disadvantaged schools in the county. On top of that, Park Community is also where Pravin went to school over 20 years ago, so being able to come back and work with the students here has been really rewarding.

The course is a six-week pilot aimed at teaching barista skills, with the hope that it might lead to part-time job opportunities for the students in the future.

We are teaching an expanded version of our Basic Barista Class, which we’ve been running for seven years now. At Canvas, this class was mandatory for all new hires, and we’ve also used it with beneficiaries as part of our impact.

For this pilot program, we’ve tailored it to the students at Park to make it more hands-on and engaging.

We are three weeks into a 6-week pilot.

In week 1, we brewed coffee on different devices to introduce the concept of brewing and using recipes.

In week 2, we spent a lot of time taking various grinders apart and cleaning them, as well as cleaning the machines.

In week 3, we moved onto making espressos and following recipes.

It’s been amazing seeing the students get up to speed so far and watching their learning progress week by week. We are only half way through but have plans to run another club in the new year and will post more updates as the course continues.

B-More Recovery Coffee Event - Inclusive Recovery Cities (Nov 2024)

Since the pandemic, there has been a lot of change for us at Canvas Coffee. Like many in hospitality, we had to close our café at the train station and shift our focus into events whilst the roasting business Sunday Coffee grew and became more viable. But despite the changes impact remains at the heart of what we do.

In September, we had the opportunity to host a “Recovery Coffee” event in Guildhall Square, Portsmouth. We served free coffee and created a welcoming space where people could have open conversations about addiction recovery, stigma, and resilience. This event was held in collaboration with B-More, a group of individuals in recovery who are working to make recovery more visible in our community.

The invitation to help with the event came from Alan Knobel, someone I’ve known and respected for over a decade. Alan oversees the drugs and alcohol budget for Portsmouth and has a deep understanding of the complex challenges people in recovery face. We first met back in 2013, when I shared my plans to start an alcohol-free bar with him. As Canvas evolved into a café, I spent the first nine months working next door to Alan at the council offices, where I gathered data on drug and alcohol issues for a community safety meeting he was part of. So, when he recently reached out to ask if we could support B-More, we were glad to get involved.

The B-More group’s mission aligns with the “Inclusive Recovery City” initiative, developed by Professor David Best of Leeds Trinity University. This initiative is based on the idea that recovery is strongest in a supportive, engaged community. By making recovery visible and challenging stigma, it aims to make Portsmouth a place where those in recovery feel valued and supported.

On the day, our role was simple: we made coffee and gave it out for free, creating a reason for people to come over and chat with members of the B-More group. It worked well, as it’s not easy to get people to stop and talk to someone on the street without a reason.

To achieve “Inclusive Recovery City” status, Portsmouth needs to host three community-focused events per year, and this was the first of those. The next events will likely take different forms but will keep the same focus on community engagement and support.

One of the day’s highlights was reconnecting with familiar faces from our old café days. Guildhall Walk is close to where our old shop was, and a few regulars stopped by, including a young man who had attended one of our barista courses a few years ago. He’d worked in the train station, and his key worker encouraged him to join the course. We all knew him back then, but none of us had any idea he was struggling with his own mental health and substance misuse issues—it goes to show how hidden addiction can be.

Seeing him again in September was really special, and he shared that he’s now in college and has plans to start his own business.

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the support we receive through our corporate events. Although our café closed, the work we do for our clients has allowed us to stay connected to our mission and continue having an impact in Portsmouth. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported us along the way.

Festive Coffee 2020

For most businesses like ours in the hospitality industry 2020 has been a write off. We closed our shop at Portsmouth & Southsea Railway Station but the good news is that we’ll be opening a new pop-up soon in the city centre.

Lockdown 2 ended up delaying the opening of this new pop-up, so with time on our hands we wanted to do something for the Christmas period that could help make an impact to those in need.

At the beginning of the pandemic we decided to donate the majority of our coffee stocks to Portsmouth Hive to be distributed to Key Workers to say thank you, so this time we wanted to do something different to simply donating stock. We’ve been inspired by the projects we’ve seen over the last year and how communities have responded to support one another – so we asked our own community what we should do.

An instagram poll we ran back in November overwhelmingly voted in favour of us producing a festive coffee which would see 100% of the profits going to organisations that support the vulnerable. An impressive 97% of respondents said they’d be happy to pay a little bit more for a coffee knowing that they would be helping a local good cause.

With some help from our importers Raw Material (who are also a social enterprise) we sourced a great coffee from Timor-Leste and are pleased to announce that this is our Festive Coffee 2020 and it’s available now!

It’s a delicious coffee from Werema Village, Timor-Leste which we cupped earlier in the year and it has notes of candied apple, hazelnut and jammy. Supplies are limited, so we recommend ordering soon to avoid disappointment.

We hope to raise between £750-£1000 and we’ll be following up with a further blogpost announcing the totals raised and where the funds went. In order to make this as impactful as possible we’re asking customers to pay for the delivery when ordering which will allow us to keep the costs lower and raise more for the good causes. 

In terms of how we distribute the funds, we’ve not done anything like this before and are not experts on this, but have been speaking with those better placed in the city.  We also ran another Poll last week where suggestions such as Mental Health Charities, Homeless Shelters, Food Banks, Children’s Charities and Dementia Services were proposed. 

Please do get in touch if you have any suggestions or ideas.

We hope you enjoy this new coffee and can help us raise a lot of money in the process. Find out more about Festive Coffee 2020 and buy it here.

Stay safe

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Are you hiring?

Are you hiring?

Do you have any vacancies? 

Can I drop off my CV?

These are possibly the most popular enquiries we get here at Canvas, whether that be in person, through our website or on social media.

Another conversation we commonly have, instead, with other café and business owners are the challenges of hiring and retaining great staff.  

We regularly hear horror stories of business owners struggling to hire and keep great staff.  Thankfully, it’s been some time since we felt as though we hired the wrong candidate (touch wood) and we have a feeling it is in part to do with how we hire.   

Our first blog post is aimed at anybody who may be interested in applying for a job with us, but also anybody interested in understanding our hiring process. 

Here’s our hiring process.

1.    When an enquiry is made we give candidates our application form (this is attached below) and we expect candidates to complete this and return it with a CV and Cover Letter (by email ideally). 

Note:  CV’s without an application form or application forms without a CV are ignored.

2.    CV’s are screened and candidates who pass this stage will be contacted to schedule a 15-20min telephone interview.  This is an opportunity for us to find out a bit more about you, reasons for applying, we will explain the role more and finally explain the next stages in the hiring process. You can also find out a bit more about us.

3.    Next is a traditional face to face interview where we will ask for references.

4.    Following the face-to-face interviews are three trial shifts lasting 4 hours each, which are paid.  There won’t be any time on the coffee machine during these shifts (that comes later) - you’ll be barista help, running tables and taking care of important behind the scenes work. 

5.    Depending on the time of the year, if we have a Basic Barista Course taking place we sometimes ask candidates to join one of our barista courses.

6.    We follow up interview with feedback on the trial shifts. We’ll talk honestly about what went well and what might need improving and we also want feedback from you. 

7.    If you are successful you will be given an offer of employment.  

8.    Should you choose to accept (which we hope you will!), we’ll invite you in to go through your contract and some admin.   

9.    As part of our on-boarding we will also have you watch some videos about coffee – including this one which we particularly love on Good Hospitality by Peter Dore Smith from Kaffeine https://tampertantrum.podbean.com/e/peter-dore-smith-tamper-tantrum-birmingham-2014/

Although we’re a speciality coffee shop and are excited about coffee, contrary to popular belief we don’t specifically look for coffee experts or even those who are experienced using an espresso machine.  

What’s more important to us, is that we find people who are proactive, care about delivering good hospitality, like coffee and are willing to learn and work well in a team.

We’re not going to lie,our hiring process is long (for good reason too).

Because it’s so long we completely get this puts some people off from applying, and unfortunately in the past we have lost good candidates because the process can take some time.

Making potential candidates aware of this ahead of time and setting some expectations is one of the purposes of this blog post.

The upside however is we’ve found the process helps us pick the right people and this in turn we believe has had a positive impact on our culture and staff turnover and in turn a better experience for our customers.

Always wanting to improve things, so if you have any comments or feeback please leave a comment below.

At the time of writing this blog post Canvas was 5 years old, employed 10 staff and the average length of service of the team was team was 2.43 years (mean) and  1.83 years (mode).

If you’re thinking of applying here’s our APPLICATION FORM, complete it and send back to us with a CV and a covering letter to hello@canvascoffee.co.uk

Our first blogpost!

Welcome to our first ever blog post which we feel is long overdue.

Canvas turned 5 this year and we have been reflecting on how much as happened during this time. What has gone well for us, the things that we are proud of, and the things that didn’t go quite as planned.

We have also been thinking about the things that we have always wanted to communicate with our customers but have never easily been able to do in the shop or on social media.

So in an attempt to share some of this – we are going turn our hand to blogging.

We sincerely hope you like the content.

Feedback is welcome.

If you like what you ready please feel free to share.

We hope this will be a space where customers can learn more about us and what we’re excited about. As well as being a space for us to share some tips and tricks and experience that we have picked up over the years.