Nourishing the barista within

OSBORNE Park-based not-for-profit employment agency, Intework, has established a new employment model aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the mainstream workforce.

The agency won a tender from the City of Wanneroo earlier this year for the lease and management of a cafe at the city’s recently upgraded Aquamotion Leisure Complex.

Intework is using the cafe, aptly named Nourish, as a vehicle to help integrate those with disabilities into the mainstream workforce by providing the skills and training needed for working in hospitality.

Intework business development manager Peter Beaton told WA Business News the intention of the cafe, which opened in September, was to provide the opportunity for people with disabilities to attain certificates one, two and three in hospitality.

“Our aim is to help people with disabilities and to provide them with work in mainstream businesses, and to experience all of the things that you would get working inside a mainstream business,” Mr Beaton said.

“At the moment we’ve got five people working in there, and the intention is to train them. They’re all working inside the cafe, they’re all doing barista duties, they’re serving, and they’re doing food preparation.

“Ultimately for each of them they’ll be able to put all those things on a resume, and that will allow them to move on to work in larger premises elsewhere and it will allow them to work even longer hours.”

The cafe has received such positive feedback in its short time in business that Mr Beaton is looking at expanding the concept, and is discussing establishing similar cafes with other metropolitan shires.

“They’ve heard about what we’re doing as a social enterprise and we’ve had enquiry from three other shires about working with them to look at the possibility of running a similar social enterprise in their facilities in the future,” he said.

“We’re involved in one project at ground level and consulting to them on the social enterprise and I think in the future the model that we’ve got here can work very well in other areas.”

Mr Beaton said the cafes would act as streaming businesses, or intermediaries to assist its employees finding employment elsewhere.

“The five people that we’ve got (at Nourish) would stay there typically for six months in total, and then we would provide employment to another five or six,” he said.

“Along the way some may already choose to find employment elsewhere, so it’s a constant process.

“In a year we could provide employment and training to anywhere between 10-15 people, and if you multiply that, potentially over three or four cafes, which would be really nice to have, then we’re talking significant numbers.”

Mr Beaton said the main obstacle in ensuring the success of Nourish was to ensure its workers remained busy.

“The biggest challenge for us at the moment is to make this cafe as viable as we can,” he said.

“In a pool setting there are busy and quiet times, so what we’re doing at the moment is working with the guys on developing outside catering.

“We’re really keen to develop our outside catering businesses to companies and functions and so on out of that cafe so in quiet times we’ve got people working busily preparing food for delivery.”