CafeSmart Founder on rallying Australia's coffee community – BeanScene

StreetSmart Founder Adam Robinson discusses the social impact of annual fundraising campaign CafeSmart, and how Australia’s coffee community has rallied around the intervention for the past 15 years.

Early in 2011, Australia’s economy suffered its biggest quarterly contraction since the recession of the early 1990s. Sitting down with our DineSmart restaurant campaign supporters in the Melbourne CBD, I was hearing that lunch trade had ended, it was tough going, and it may not get better any time soon.

One restaurant owner told me “everyone is still getting a coffee, you should try partnering with cafés”. It’s often your supporters who have the best ideas.

That conversation got me thinking – Melbourne was at the forefront of the specialty coffee movement and we already had a number of great café partners running DineSmart, but it wasn’t a natural fit for most operations. How could we find the right model for cafés that could scale rapidly?

I met with a few café owners. Salvatore Malatesta at ST. ALi, a long time DineSmart partner, was the first I chatted to. He immediately said he’d be in and would support a new concept, so we explored ideas. I then spoke to Joanne Feehan at Allpress about how coffee roasters could get involved, and we decided roasters would be key to our scaling the idea.

These conversations, and others, gave me enough confidence to refine the ideas and launch CafeSmart a few months later. 

Community connection

The power of CafeSmart has been the simplicity of the model, matched with local impact.

Cafés are all about community, they are hubs of activity where people come to meet, and they give us a sense of belonging and connection as we meet friends or just sit and watch the world go by. Their owners and staff see the world at street level and understand the rhythms of place and people. 

Understanding this and doubling down on our localised impact strategy from our DineSmart campaign was a great fit. Through our community grants program donations from cafés stay local, often supporting services within 500 metres of the café’s front door.

It’s a powerful collaboration model. Our grants back local community leaders to find the best responses in their community for the challenges locals face.

CafeSmart is all about rallying support to help strengthen these communities to be resilient and be able to respond to local needs.

“The CafeSmart fundraiser is a day our crew really look forward to. It’s a chance to ditch their uniforms for anything yellow,” says Yahava CoffeeWorks in Swan Valley on Whadjuk Noongar country.

“While it is a lot of fun it is also a serious cause. We are passionate about raising funds for folk who really need a hand up in our local community. Asking our customers to match our donation makes this a special event. It’s a fundraiser we do together, that’s what makes it different.”

Collaboration

CafeSmart is still here after 15 years because of the passionate people who get involved, it’s a huge collective effort. We are a tiny team here at StreetSmart, so our partnerships with the hundreds of small business owners, along with enthusiastic staff, are what drive the campaign.

From partners such as Vitasoy, La Marzocco, and CoffeeTools, to our champion coffee roasters, both running the campaign in their cafés and supporting their wholesale customers to get involved, to the smallest hole in the wall café. In total more than 3300 cafes and roasters have played their part.

Over the 15 years we’ve endured some tough economic headwinds, and the COVID pandemic and lockdowns. Even then, with little preparation, cafés across Australia still stepped up and raised $80,000 in 2020.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vital role that smaller, grassroots charities, embedded in community, play as a first place that people go when faced with hardship. 

Fundraising isn’t an easy gig, you need people to jump on board and be your cheerleaders, it’s a team sport. Luckily, along the way CafeSmart has had plenty of champions and many have been with us for 15 years. 

Why is CafeSmart still needed?

CafeSmart takes place during Homelessness Week each year. That grounds us and the event in the real reason for all this effort. It also provides and important platform to advocate for sustainable systems change. 

As COVID morphed into a deep cost-of-living and housing crisis, today we are seeing record numbers of people seeking help. Small services are currently overrun and seeing donations fall. Our network reports a 20 to 30 per cent surge in demand this year with many people seeking help for the first time in their lives.

This is why our small community grants are vital to plug the funding gaps and provide immediate responses to people in crisis, including meals, swags and tents, warm clothing, shoes, socks, phone cards, help with rent, and so much more. 

It’s confronting to know these basic items are needed, but that’s the reality for too many but close to 300,000 people who sought help from Specialist Homelessness Services in 2024, which doesn’t count all those who sought help elsewhere or those who have stayed hidden.

What I love about CafeSmart 

It’s the energy, fun, creativity, and commitment it generates. The ‘special sauce’ is that our hyper local approach creates connections that can last years and result in more support for the local services. 

To date, CafeSmart has raised and distributed $2.2million to support close to 1500 community grants.

Cafés, there is still time to sign up here, while individual supporters can check out the café map and donate here.

For more than two decades, Adam Robinson has been dedicated to improving the lives of people experiencing homelessness. In 2003, he founded StreetSmart Australia, a grassroots charity that channels community action into real-world impact for those most in need.