Once Homeless, Youth Seizes Job Opportunity and Gives Back

When Colleen Landy was program director of Philadelphia’s Covenant House shelter for homeless youths, she asked the CEO of the Saxbys Coffee chain for help in “mainstreaming” residents by finding them jobs.

He jumped.

“I told Colleen I’d be there the next morning, and I told her to have the most hirable person ready for me,” Nick Bayer says.

When he arrived, high school senior Dante Wilson was ready for him. Dante’s mother had kicked him out of the house for running with the wrong crowd and generally behaving irresponsibly. Now that he’d had a taste of life in a homeless shelter, he was desperate to get out.

Nick recounts his first impression: “I get there, look in the window of this little conference room in the shelter and Dante is sitting in a room by himself in a blazer, smiling. You go in thinking it will be a sad place, and there’s a young man by himself with a huge smile on his face. I knew I was going to hire him.”

Nick hired Dante for one of his café’s. Dante didn’t have job experience, though, so he started with cleaning the café and busing tables. A week later, Nick called his franchisee to see how things were going with Dante.

“It’s going really well,” he was told. “He’s eager, he works hard and he gets along with everybody. By the way, if you don’t mind, we’d like to put him through barista training.”

So Dante became a barista, and a month later the team created a “team member of the month” award just to show their coworker how much they appreciated his work ethic. Dante wound up winning the award seven months straight.

In his seven years at Saxbys, Dante has been promoted multiple times, and Nick says customers regularly send the company emails singling him out for praise—not a common phenomenon in the coffee-shop industry.

Jobs change lives. When Nick hired Dante, he changed Dante’s life. It’s a day Dante will never forget. “Mr. Nick Bayer walked into Covenant House and I saw this tall slicked-back-hair, done-up guy and thought, ‘I won’t get the job,’ ” he says. “But I got it, and once Saxbys became part of my life, everything happened.”

In the wake of Dante’s success, Nick has hired many other young people who might otherwise have found it challenging to get jobs.

“I want to make an impact in the city,” he says. “It breaks my heart to see young people sleeping on the streets and a fifteen-yearold sticking a gun in someone’s face for money. Kids surrounded by bad circumstances see no hope. Now I can do something about that and I’m going to continue to do something about that. I don’t want to do the easy thing—I want to do the right thing. We employ seven hundred people, and most of those jobs are entry-level. We can make an effort to hire people who need help for some of those positions. We can teach life skills. My responsibility as a business leader is to be additive and provide them with opportunity and hold them accountable. If they do well, they’ll be promoted here, or we’ll give them great references so they can succeed somewhere else.”

A key way that Saxbys offers life-skills instruction is through its mentoring program. “Some of the kids coming out of challenging circumstances need to be treated a little bit differently than other
employees,” Nick says. “They need to learn how to show up on time, how to plan time to get from where they are to work, how to use a paycheck properly.” Saxbys takes the time to teach those things.

Once a mentee, Dante is now taking a lead in the mentoring program to help guide youths who have come from difficult situations like he did. Considering his level of gratitude for the opportunity that Nick gave him, his commitment to giving back is no surprise.

“Saxbys changed my perspective and my world,” he says. “If it weren’t for Nick, I’d probably still be living on the streets. To this day, I’m like ‘Oh my God, I’m the luckiest guy in the world.’ ”

I’ll drink to that . . . at Saxbys!

This story is from the book, Humankind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time, a National Bestseller filled with true stories about how one small deed can make a world of difference.