Sunlight pours through the floor-to-ceiling glass, making the coffee shop’s white brick wall and cheery furniture seem even brighter. Orange, turquoise and purple ropes track across the ceiling like webs, each leading to a rectangular light.
The ropes represent people’s varied journeys. And the lights are the doors that lead to the rest of their lives.
David Jepson, a barista sprinkling a chai latte with cinnamon, got here the long way.
Like many who will work at Purple Door, which opened last month at 16th Avenue and Sherman Street in Denver, Jepson was homeless as a teenager. His mother died when he was 17, and his relationship with his father had been wrecked by years focused solely on caring for his mom. Jepson left home in Thornton and spent years sleeping on the streets.
Now 34, Jepson has an apartment and full-time job in one of the city’s hippest new coffee shops.
Purple Door is an extension of the nonprofit Dry Bones, which operates a walk-in center where young people who are homeless can shower, play pool and find a seat at the 16-person dining table. The first version of the coffee shop existed for a few years in the Five Points neighborhood, but closed in 2019 when the nonprofit realized its approach to job training wasn’t quite right.
Dry Bones used to hire kids living on the streets to work behind the espresso bar, at the same time offering them help with housing and therapy. This time around, the plan to get teens and young adults on track is much more gradual. The nonprofit has opened a coffee roaster in Englewood, where young people go through a yearlong job readiness program before they graduate. Then they can apply to work at the new Purple Door, or any other job.
The lattes, cookies and pies sold at Purple Door, plus the beans sold at other coffee shops and through home-delivery subscriptions, fund the job readiness program that helps get young people off the streets.
In what’s been a rough few years for downtown eateries, Dry Bones executive director Matt Wallace is relying on office workers and whoever else strolls by the coffee shop with the bright-yellow chairs on its patio. Already, customers are lured by the famous Guard and Grace chocolate chip cookies, Hinman pies and cupcakes from Steuben’s.
Wallace is hopeful that sales will soar on Sundays, when parishioners pour into Central Presbyterian Church. The church, which operates a men’s homeless shelter in its basement, is leasing the space at the edge of its building to Purple Door.
Coloradans are overwhelmed by the homelessness crisis and concerned about “the people camping in their front yards,” Wallace said. “When you don’t know what else to do and you feel completely overwhelmed, one thing you can do is go buy a latte,” he said. Besides, Purple Door — which uses beans ethically sourced from Nicaragua, Brazil and Uganda — offers “an incredible coffee experience,” he said.
“You have value”
So far, Purple Door is shipping 75-100 monthly subscriptions of its beans, which come in bags decorated with the same web of lines leading toward a door. The roaster supplies coffee to about 20 churches, 20 offices and a handful of other coffee shops that stock its beans.
It’s called Purple Door because purple is the color of royalty and self-worth, which is what the entire program is trying to restore. Black letters on a white wall at the coffee shop spell out the message: “You have value.”
This belief that you have unsurpassable worth and value is something that we are trying to infuse into every conversation, every activity, every moment that we do.
— Matt Wallace, Dry Bones executive director
“Society has told them they’re worthless, their families have told them they’re worthless, the systems have let them down in a way that they feel like they’re being told they’re worthless,” Wallace said. “And so this belief that you have unsurpassable worth and value is something that we are trying to infuse into every conversation, every activity, every moment that we do.”
What Dry Bones learned in its first iteration of the coffee shop was that many young people who survived on the streets needed time to develop their self-worth before they could deal with the stress of the morning rush, and customers in general. When the workers feel valued, they pass the feeling onto customers.
“We also want every customer that walks through the door of the cafe to feel like they’re being reciprocated in that same way,” Wallace said. “If a young person is beginning to believe that about themselves, which we see all the time, it’s like this awakening that starts happening.”
About 45 people, staggered in cohorts of about six, have gone through the job program, which teaches them not only how to pour the perfect latte but how to show up for work on time and take criticism from a manager or a customer. Participants, who are paid minimum wage to package and ship coffee beans, also get help finding housing, dealing with outstanding warrants or mental health counseling. Some enter the program while still living on the streets or in homeless shelters.
Dry Bones, established in 2001, got its name from an Old Testament story from the chapter of Ezekiel in which God shows Ezekiel a valley scattered with brittle, dried-up rib cages and bones. “Can these bones live?” God asks, and then, with a rattling noise, brings the bones back to human form.
Making a “mental gear switch”
Jepson first wandered into Dry Bones day shelter because he wanted a place to take a shower. At 17, he had been using drugs and camping out around the city, vying on cold nights for the spot between radiators in a skate park on the west side of downtown.
It took awhile, he said, but he began to trust the people who worked there. And the job program — in which he would show up for work on time at the original Purple Door and work hard and in exchange, he would get paid — made sense to him.
“It was like you are going to have to work here, we’ll help you with that but we’re not going to forgive you every transgression,” he said. “You’re going to show up, be part of the system like everybody else. That was the exact kind of structure that I needed. I was no longer interested in being addicted to substances. I was no longer interested in being homeless.”
While Jepson made it through the hands-on job training program at the original coffee shop, many of his peers did not.
Other people do not know about your struggle. They just came to get a cup of coffee.”
— David Jepson, Purple Door barista
“The biggest problem that they seem to be having was people, many who earnestly wanted to change, hadn’t made that mental gear switch,” he said. “They were still carrying those addictions and those issues, and they were carrying them with them to work. And you can’t do that in a regular job, much less any one that involves customer service. Because other people do not know about your struggle. They just came to get a cup of coffee.”
Living on the streets, people learn to fight back as a first response, Jepson said. “That’s how you survive,” he said. “But when someone is rude to you about their cappuccino, you can’t fly off at them.”
After working at the coffee shop, Jepson spent time in New York and Florida, then, serendipitously, he says, returned to Colorado just as the new Purple Door was opening. Now he is one of the mentors for young people who complete the job training program at the roaster and get hired by the coffee shop.
He knows where they are coming from, and why they got stuck out there.
“You see someone who’s out there and they seem like they’re set, and it’s because they are,” he said. “They’ve figured out when they’re going to eat. They’ve figured out where they’re going to sleep. They’ve figured out where they are going to get whatever mind-altering thing allows them to live that life. The next thing you know, it’s been three years. And it’s been six years.”
The color of royalty
Many of the young people who find Dry Bones and Purple Door have aged out of the foster care system, while others, like Jepson, ran away from home. After providing warm meals, taking them bowling and on camping trips, and helping them get their GEDs, the next step was helping them find work, Wallace said.
“We could hold hands with someone, figuratively, through the process of applying for a job or going into their interview, building the resume that they don’t really have because they’ve lived on the streets since they were 14, 15 years old,” Wallace said. “And they kept striking out. They’d get hired at McDonald’s. They would work a week or two, and the manager would have to let them go, or they would quit, because they didn’t know how to get along with their coworker, or they were late three days in a row.”
That led to the opening of the first Purple Door in 2013.
Customers will notice the new Purple Door doesn’t actually have a purple door like the original coffee shop did. It did for a minute, though.
Just before its opening, an unknown person smashed the coffee shop’s glass front door so the crew temporarily replaced it with plywood.
And the employees painted it purple.
