April 9, 1998 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Jeff Reifman has set out to be a modern-day Johnny Appleseed: He intends to start a crop of socially conscious coffeehouses, record stores, and other enterprises which will in turn create yet more businesses that do good works.
Mr. Reifman has started his quest by creating Habitat Espresso, a Seattle cafe that donates half its profits to charity and half to a fund that provides capital to new businesses.
To date, Habitat Espresso has given slightly more than $9,000 to charities, including over $2,000 to the Chicken Soup Brigade, a charity that delivers meals to house-bound AIDS patients, and over $2,000 to Childhaven, a charity that helps children who have suffered violence or other abuse by their parents.
The 27-year-old can afford to be so ambitious. A project manager at Microsoft, Mr. Reifman put $90,000 of his own money into Habitat Espresso. He won’t reveal his net worth, but he says Microsoft’s stock has grown 15-fold in the seven years since he started working there and receiving shares in the company.
Microsoft’s success has not only allowed Mr. Reifman to start Habitat Espresso. The company has also matched the donations Mr. Reifman makes through the cafe.
Microsoft, which gives $1 for every $1 an employee gives to charity, up to $12,000 a year, has provided another $9,000 to the charities Mr. Reifman and employees of Habitat Espresso chose to support with the profits from the cafe.
Mr. Reifman, who draws no money of his own from the coffee shop, has wanted to help the needy since he first saw a homeless person on a childhood trip to Paris. He thought about setting up a charitable fund or writing a few big checks to his favorite charities. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt that doing so would be a bad investment.
“Traditional giving,” he says, “doesn’t go to scale to address the kinds of problems that we have in our society.”
Societal problems, he believes, grow worse at such a fast pace that a charitable fund would not have sufficient resources to make the kind of difference he would like to make.
But, he reasoned, a successful business would have a better chance at providing a return on an investment that might keep pace with needs. He used the experience of his employer, Microsoft, as his inspiration for how a business’s assets could grow far beyond the size of an original investment.
Operating in the Capitol Hill district, a neighborhood that is popular with many young people, Habitat Espresso looks promising. Its cash register has been ringing up about 300 transactions a day, which Mr. Reifman says signifies about 600 people stopping in.
Mr. Reifman promotes the philanthropic nature of the cafe with a large mural that explains that all profits go to charity.
He named the coffeehouse to reinforce the social mission — it represents his insistence on buying only organically grown coffee beans to help save wildlife habitats from chemicals and toxins. But Mr. Reifman said he also hoped the name would help demonstrate the “living-room environment I wanted to create.”
He says he hopes that in addition to raising money for good works, Habitat Espresso will encourage young people to find ways to become more philanthropic — and do more to change society.
“There is a lot of cynicism among young people, especially when they see corporations taking over the world,” he says. “I should talk, being here at Microsoft, but you see a Starbucks, McDonald’s, Sam Goody’s everywhere. There is a subtle, psychological pull, which makes young people think this is not their world, and there’s no way for them to make a difference.”
He hopes his example will teach them otherwise: “We’re trying to show them something else,” he says.
Mr. Reifman is beginning plans for a second business: It will probably be a record store.
“With all of this,” he says, “I hope to address the scale of the need.”
