Winner Update: The Percolator Fund Inc

I want to thank you all who were here last time. It means so much to us that you put your confidence behind our organization. We’re a startup as you know, you know, that means you took a chance on us. It’s risky when you have an organization that has a concept that is different than anybody else has presented before. We’ve been in business for two years. We’ve got a pilot project, it’s been successful. We went that night from being an organization that would raise a few hundred dollars and then put those few hundred dollars immediately to work in our programs. So we went from hand to mouth and how are we going to grow this program to meet the needs of adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities in our community who want a future with skilled employment in the coffee industry and, and do it in a way that would make you all proud and make, um, people want to invest in our futures beyond this. And we’ve reached out to national organizations and we’ve done that before and we’d never gotten the responses. But after the impact club and getting the recognition and the amplification of our story, we’ve gotten so many responses. We are hoping to align the curriculum that we designed for the adults in our community with the specialty coffee industry, and we’re going to be represented at their next national expo in Portland, Oregon in April and so we will be able to network with leaders in the, in the coffee industry and get the word out about why they should be hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities because those folks with the proper training will be the best employees that they will ever have.