In 2020, we founded SEND Coffee - a group of coffee shops where we support young adults with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities to transition in to the workplace

We work with young adults, aged 18-25, for 2 years.

The first year is 1:1 support delivered inside our coffee shops with a 'Mentor'. During this year, where we give them over 900 hours of life changing training, we teach them all of the tricky parts of being an adult so that they can become independent. For example, we often work with people who have never left the house alone, and teach them how to take the bus, tube, or even to drive. Or we work with individuals who have never cooked for themselves, and teach them how to make a breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

This life transformative support then leads into our second year where we help them find and keep jobs, usually in the coffee industry. So far we've worked with over 60 young people, and all of them have successfully learned all life skill goals. Every year, almost all of our graduates find and are offered jobs.

Our hope is that by delivering our training, we can work with young people who deserve the chance to be independent and choose their own paths. Many of our young people wish to become baristas and work, but more and more we're finding that they enjoy cooking, and wish to work in kitchens or similar with our support. This is one of the reasons we were inspired to open a site which has more of a focus on food, as it gives our learners another opportunity to flourish.

But now, we want to start something really exciting - a SEND Bakery!

We have been given an exciting opportunity by ARC Collective to set up a bakery in their space, where we can not only support their food bank pantry model with bread, but train our young adults how to be bakers. This is something we've tried to do in our coffee shops over the years, but have never had the facility to teach them in a commercial kitchen. We are really excited by the prospect of further enhancing the skill set of our learners, you can be part of this mission by donating to our fundraising page.

Sadly, in 2024 we had to close down our original site, hidden coffee, in Camden. It was at this site that we did most of our cooking training, including an infamous Bake Off between the young people we work with. As our new space will be tucked away inside the foodbank, we're excited to say that we'll be naming this new bakery hidden, resurrecting the beloved original name of our charity project.

Our hope is that we can fundraise to get this amazing project started - and hopefully, 5 years from now, SEND Bakery will have helped as many people with disabilities as SEND Coffee already has. Our vision is that SEND Bakery will stock a whole host of pastries and baked goods that Londoners know and love, but to allow this dream to become a reality we need your support. Any donation, no matter how big or small, is greatly appreciated. This is your chance to help found a charity.

Thank you for your support!

The SEND Team