Pour-tland

[July 16th, 2008]

The city of Portland has found a clever way to handle the glut of overeducated baristas. It involves training more undereducated baristas.

On July 9, the City Council voted unanimously to renew a $119,000 program that seeks to make service-with-a-smile espresso jockeys out of a couple dozen “at-risk youth”—bureau-speak for troubled and/or troublemaking teens.

Of course, the idea isn’t really to take jobs from aspiring older slackers and part-time members of the “creative class,” but to give poor kids something to put on a résumé.

The program is managed by the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center. That North Killingsworth Court nonprofit draws most of its nearly $2 million annual revenue from government sources, including the city.

For the city’s $119,000, POIC supplies trainees to locally owned Bridgetown Coffee, which devised the three-week training curriculum. Trainees also staff a coffee kiosk for New Seasons.

The program is entering its fifth year, and city officials are starting to have some doubts. For the first time, the city put POIC’s barista-training contract on a six-month probation because too few trainees had improved their income and career prospects.

The city Bureau of Housing and Community Development, which oversees the contract, says POIC last year failed to meet its goal of having 16 barista trainees increase their income by 25 percent after three years. (Granted, trainees could exceed that modest goal if the city simply wrote each of the 16 personal checks for $7,400.)

“When this program was established there was a concern by the proposal review committee that the coffee industry is all dead-end jobs,” says Lynn Knox, who oversees the housing bureau’s “economic opportunity” programs. “The program sold it to us by saying there is significant advancement opportunity in the industry...it hasn’t been happening.”

Which raises a troubling prospect: If the program doesn’t work, then it amounts to a subsidy for certain employers in an already low-paying industry. The $119,000 the city is spending to help train 26 new baristas is enough to cover a year’s tuition and fees for 32 students at Portland Community College.

“What the work does is motivate them to care about school. (The kids think) ‘Do I want to make coffee for the rest of my life? No.’ Because now (they) know what it’s like to work,” says POIC President Joe McFerrin II. “

Bridgetown Coffee President Donald Jensen praises the program, and says it supplied him with workers he might not otherwise have hired.

Bridgetown pays half the trainees’ wages; POIC pays the rest, using a portion of the millions in federal block grants doled out by the city housing bureau. So while the trainees make $8.50 an hour—more than Oregon’s $7.95-an-hour minimum wage—Jensen pays only $4.25 an hour, thanks to taxpayers.

“I get nothing out of it. I pay wages. What we’re getting out of it is helping kids,” Jensen says. “We’ve had quite a few young people who come through here who honestly would’ve stayed in the system of unemployment. Now they’re actively involved.”

Another city-funded POIC project, the Youth Employment & Empowerment Program, has been meeting its goals. So what went wrong with barista training?

“I don’t know if it’s the program or the administration. I think it’s a little of both,” says Knox.

POIC’s McFerrin says the bureau’s tracking system, which measures trainees’ incomes over three years, is a poor fit for young people: “I could have a kid in the program for two years. If they decide to go back to college at PCC (and stop working), I’ve got a negative hit.”

McFerrin says the program could continue in some form if the city ended the contract, but it would mean finding a way to make it generate more revenue.