One in 10 young adults between 18 and 25 years old experience some form of homelessness throughout a year in America, according to a 2017 study conducted by Chapin Hall.
Breaktime, founded in 2018 by Tony Shu and Connor Schoen, wants to help fix that. Breaktime is a nonprofit social enterprise that provides transitional employment opportunities to homeless youths in Boston. It focuses on employment, career mentorship and job advice.
“Stable employment is the most critical factor in achieving stable housing for people experiencing homelessness," said Shu, who is a rising senior at Harvard University. "We really wanted to dive deep into employment as kind of a lever of change.”
As a transitional employer, the company differs from traditional job training programs, which teach professional skills and provide job placement assistance.
“[With] a job training program, it can be exceedingly difficult to obtain and maintain a stable job," Shu said. "Breaktime offers transitional employment, where young adults are actually working in a real workplace with a manager and a team, earning a living wage, and they have the time and space and support to put their skills they find in a job training program into practice.”
With Breaktime’s transitional employment, homeless youths have the opportunity to gain work experience through the company’s Double Impact Initiative.
The Double Impact Initiative provides the young adults with three types of employment opportunities: meal production and delivery, cleaning services and mask manufacturing. The initiative provides work for the young adults at the same time it helps underserved communities in Boston, hence the name "Double Impact."
As part of the Double Impact Initiative and in partnership with Community Work Services, a job training and placement organization, Breaktime employees serve meals to local communities facing food insecurity.
“Young adults are actually serving meals to a lot of people who can be considered neighbors or people in their own community," Shu said. "They're serving family shelters, so people experiencing homelessness. They're serving people with disabilities and senior citizens."
Last fall, Breaktime started moving forward on a new plan: It signed a lease for a new café at 170 Portland St. in Boston’s West End. Breaktime Café, in partnership with Community Work Services, was set to open in April. The café would serve baked goods and coffee, establish a community space and provide jobs to the young adults. For Shu, having a brick-and-mortar space was important because it would increase visibility: Patrons would see their servers face to face.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic halted the opening of Breaktime Café. Instead, Breaktime pivoted and decided to sell its ethically sourced coffee beans on its online shop for the time being.
The beans are sourced from a family farm in Guatemala and are Rainforest Alliance Certified. With the purchase of one bag of coffee beans, the company donates one meal to someone experiencing food insecurity, which supports the transitional employment for homeless youths.
Breaktime is a part of the Harvard i-lab’s 2020 Summer Venture Program and will be renewing its term for the fall.
Breaktime is 100-percent youth-led. While Shu is still at Harvard, his co-founder Schoen, 22, graduated from Harvard last year and is the oldest member of the 11-person team.
They describe themselves as “action-driven optimists.”
“We're optimistic about individuals’ futures," said Shu. "We're optimistic about the ultimate direction of our community and where things are headed. But I think optimism needs to be tied with a commitment to taking action. We know that we have these lofty visions, but we have to be committed to doing the hard work."
Emma Campbell is a contributing writer for BostInno.
