Helen Loos is almost done with her afternoon shift at Purple Door Coffee. She runs the dishwasher, wipes down the sinks, and ensures everything in the kitchen is where it’s supposed to be. Now in her second month at Purple Door, she’s getting accustomed to the daily routine, and keeping her kitchen organized takes top priority.
“I’m kind of picky when it comes to my kitchen. I don’t like working in a dirty kitchen,” Loos said. “My OCD kind of gets me into trouble, but it actually works out very well here.”
Loos initially found Purple Door through its parent organization, Dry Bones Inc., a nonprofit organization geared toward providing companionship and community for young people experiencing homelessness. After leaving home for the first time when she was 13, Loos moved between foster care, staying with family and living on her own as a teenager and young adult.
“I woke up one morning to my mother standing over my bed with a butcher knife,” she reflected. “I was safer out on the streets than I was at home.”
Loos soon returned home so she and her younger brother would be eligible to enter the foster care system, which took the siblings to Colorado Springs. She later graduated from Sand Creek High School in 2005. After aging out of foster care and following a series of decisions Loos said sent her “down stupid street,” she ended up at a Movement 5280 meeting in 2011. She quickly became a regular participant and started working part-time. But despite initial privileges, Loos found herself feeling increasingly judged by the organization’s Christian leadership for past decisions.
Loos continued to work with Movement 5280 for almost a decade, hanging on to promises of mental health services that never fully materialized. By 2020, she’d had enough. Feeling used, Loos began to look elsewhere.
“I said, ‘If I don’t figure a way to get this help, I’m not going to be here long enough to do anything because I’m literally going to go crazy’,” Loos said.
Cue Purple Door Coffee. Loos had known about Dry Bones for years, but when the organization connected Loos to mental health services within a week of her seeking services she knew it was time to switch. That was two years ago. Today, Loos has completed the year-long job training and is working part-time as a kitchen assistant.
Established in 2012, Purple Door Coffee started out as a coffee roastery operating under the purview of Dry Bones. The organization tried opening a storefront in 2013, but it closed down after several years. The organization used the next ten years to expand the roastery’s operations and establish an employment readiness program to teach participants the ins and outs of coffee production.
“The idea is that people go through the program at the roastery, and then if they want, once they graduate they can come here and become a barista,” said Cafe General Manager Maria Lopes. “It’s very individual. The curriculum changes, varies group to group depending on their needs.”
Right now, Lopes said, four people are going through the job readiness program, which takes participants through a specialized curriculum at the Purple Door roastery located in Englewood. The goal is by the end of the program participants will be able to secure a job or an internship at the Purple Door’s coffee shop or elsewhere. In the future, Lopes hopes to add a barista certificate to provide participants with a “concrete” piece of education to take with them. Eventually, she wants to see the cafe expand to include a bakery and kitchen, with accompanying certificates for participants who want to pursue other avenues in the food industry.
Purple Door reopened its physical storefront in Capitol Hill in 2021. The coffee shop boasts a full espresso bar, pastries and snacks, and employs two graduates of Purple Door’s job readiness program, including Loos. Lopes emphasized that Purple Door focuses on the path of each individual over high participation numbers or other quantitative measures, which can make it harder to secure funding and grants. Instead, the program’s goal is to build personal connections.
“We’re just trying to reach people and have an impact,” Lopes said. “We’re not trying to solve all the problems because we know we can’t, but we’re trying to contribute to the solution a little bit. We build these relationships. We are a family, and we hope they feel like that too, that they can count on us.”
One of Purple Door’s key philosophies is embracing the journey. This includes the ups and downs of moving indoors from the street, which Lopes pointed out wasn’t for everyone.
“When you transition between these two worlds, it’s really hard,” Lopes said. “You have to [learn to] abide by the rules of society, how you dress, how you smell, how many showers you take, things that most people don’t think about. The journey—it’s not like a flat line, it’s lots of twists. So we understand that and we respect people’s journey.”
Loos smiled as she recalled her and her husband’s first move inside several years ago. The program sponsoring them, Housing 180, provided the couple with a mattress. Loos said they never used it because they were more comfortable sleeping on the floor. When they moved out, they donated the mattress back to the organization. “We said, ‘We don’t mean this to be rude, but we never used it’,” Loos laughed.
Getting used to having her own space was also an adjustment.
“When we first got into our place, we were so used to being outside, being roommates with somebody else or crashing on someone else’s floor that for the first two weeks, we were literally whispering to each other,” Loos recalled.
Loos and her husband have now been in their current apartment for three years, their longest stretch to date. Loos is happy with their progress and said, besides learning about the coffee industry, she’s learning to love herself.
“Rather than falling back and losing everything, we actually have a chance to move up,” Loos said. “That’s a huge step for us. For the longest time, I was in the shadows. I literally just started learning how to love myself and how to see myself as a good person rather than just someone that’s here.”