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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Karl Carlisle, above, greets customers every Wednesday at the West End Community Cafe.
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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
McKinzie Harrison pauses to show off some food in the midst of the lunch rush at West End Community Cafe.
Karl Carlisle holds a small counter in his hand as he greets diners at West End Community Cafe every Wednesday. Though it’s in the same building, the cafe is a wholly different concept from the soup kitchen his mother, Belle Carlisle, ran for more than 30 years.
“I know that myself, that a lot of people who come here really don’t have enough money, that some might be homeless, but they’re able to come in and eat a good meal,” Karl Carlisle said.
The West End Community Cafe is a pay-what-you-can cafe in the Urban Ministry building at 1229 Cotton Ave. SW. Every Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., more than 100 customers come in for a healthy, home-cooked meal and pay either through a donation or through work, such as bussing a table.
“One of the things we found is the ability for people to do something for the meal that they eat — there’s dignity in that,” said Urban Ministry Executive Director Hill Carmichael.
Urban Ministry started in 1978 and also provides an after-school children’s program, summer learning, home repair and homelessness prevention programs.
In 2015, Carmichael said Belle Carlisle’s retirement prompted Urban Ministry to look at new uses for its soup kitchen. Though the kitchen fed more than 100 people per day five days a week, Carmichael said they saw the potential for community and small-scale economic development. He wanted something West End could be proud of.
“We really envisioned a place that wasn’t just the soup kitchen mentality. Soup kitchens are wonderful, and if you fed one person, you made an impact in a life. But what soup kitchens have not done, in my opinion, is move people from poverty to opportunity, and we wanted to be a catalyst for that kind of change,” Carmichael said.
After months of renovations, the community cafe opened first to 30 people chosen as West End’s neighborhood ambassadors, who were asked to give their perspective on everything from the menu to the service to the décor.
“They really helped shape this place,” he said.
Carmichael said the goal was for West End to take ownership of its cafe.
“People want their communities to be all they can be,” he said.
The community cafe opened to the public in March. It serves more than one purpose — as Carmichael puts it, there are four purposes: “employment, education, enterprise and eatin.’”
“We like to say that when you can’t even get to the G [in eating], you know the food is really good,” he said.
Ingredients from Urban Ministry’s community garden often find their way onto the menu. Carmichael said the rest of the food comes from donations and wholesalers, and every meal is designed to be nutritious. Chefs Ama Shambulia and McKinzie Harrison develop the menu each week, with one day’s menu including chicken quesadillas, beans, corn, salad and peaches.
West End Community Cafe has become a community gathering spot. Carmichael said each Wednesday, diners range from West End neighbors to professionals on lunch break to families and more. They also have hosted several events there.
“You get a good mix of community within West End, people out of West End, and I don’t think anyone feels out of place,” Harrison said. “It’s a beautiful space, and I think this will engage other people in creating a better West End.”
Karl Carlisle said he knows a handful of regular diners who were homeless when they first came to the cafe and now have jobs, but continue to return on Wednesdays.
“That’s a blessing right there,” Karl Carlisle said.
All four of the cafe’s purposes come together in its internship program. The cafe has three local interns who are on a two-year program to learn about life skills and everything that makes a restaurant run. They are involved in every aspect of the cafe and studying on the days when they’re not working.
“The only reason we have a cafe, the only reason we have a garden, the reason we have an urban kids program and a housing repair program is so that we can hire interns — young adults in the neighborhood [age] 18 to 30 — and they go through a 24-month workforce [program],” Carmichael said.
Harrison, who serves as the chef instructor, said the interns had no cooking experience when they arrived but have picked up those skills quickly. As a former college-level culinary instructor who moved to Ensley two years ago, Harrison said she enjoys seeing her meals make a difference in the lives of interns and the people she feeds.
“We’re seeing so much growth, they’re excited,” Harrison said. “It’s learning to be successful whether they work in a restaurant job or if they work at Wal-Mart, they have those personal skills to succeed.”
One of those interns is Chakela Bone, 22, who lives in Wylam. Despite her lack of cooking experience when she began, Bone said the “wonderful” experience at the cafe has encouraged her to start her own restaurant in Birmingham someday.
“I learned how to cut; I learned how to cook healthy food, how to make healthy food, what’s the difference between healthy food and fast food,” Bone said.
Encouraging job skills and entrepreneurship in these interns, Carmichael said, is critical to the cafe’s goal of economic change in West End.
“My biggest hope is that they don’t go on to do incredible stuff by leaving West End, but that they went on to change their own lives and thereby changing West End by staying in it and making it better, making it the community they want it to be,” Carmichael said.
Urban Ministry staff members want to create another social enterprise project like the community cafe in the future. The cafe also will begin offering lunch on Thursdays after Labor Day. A $5 donation is requested to offset the cost of the food, and higher donations will go toward paying the cafe interns or providing a meal for someone who cannot pay.
For more information, visit urban-ministry.org/our-ministries/community-kitchen.
