After more than 5 years of planning, fundraising, and envisioning opening the HAS HEART Coffee Shop, the historic stone building is beginning to take shape with fresh drywall and exterior patio work underway.
For the past 10+ years, we’ve only had 1-month pop-up shops and exhibits to share our mission, showcase the HERO[series] projects and VOICES projects, and generate revenue to fund the next year’s project. We’ve relied on a small team of volunteers and have kept our liabilities and expenses to a minimum.
More than 12 years after our founders, Michael and Tyler, met over a cup of coffee, we’re 12-14 weeks away from serving our own coffee (via Madcap Coffee Co.) within a historic building on the grounds of Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Grand Rapids, MI.
After over ten years of conducting HERO[series] collaborative projects where we partner a Veteran with a graphic designer to share their story visually, we have racked up quite a library of stories and designs. So much so that we don’t have room in our space to showcase all of them at once.
That is until we realized the potential of producing each design into a notebook (or laptop) sized decal with the help of our friends at Sticker Mule. For years, we’ve worked with them to transition designs from t-shirts and posters, which we first started with in our initial HERO[series] projects, into premium die-cut stickers that can be safely attached to your favorite items to build your own gallery of support.
We’re excited to work with Mathile Design Co. (who helped bring our shadow box table concept to life, as seen in Update 04) to create a custom decal organizer to be mounted on our camo mural wall.
Over the past couple of weeks, the exterior patio has been being finished with the re-purposed granite from the old Veterans Memorial Park fountain that was originally built in the 1920s. The crews had the difficult task of gently placing these blocks of heavy pavers, but their hard work will pay off once the back patio is filled with folks sitting along the bench, around the outdoor tables, and ordering at the walk-up window.
While there are a lot more updates and detail work we COULD show you, we’d rather wait a little longer for you to experience them all yourself once we’re operational. Until then, here’s a little teaser of our custom-printed coffee mugs and to-go cups that will be the reference point for all the other details and decore to fill the space around them.
We’re looking forward to serving you soon!
None of this would be possible without the help of several partners, organizations, foundations, and individual contributors, including:
Grand Rapids Parks and Recreation
Downtown Development Authority
Grand Rapids Community Foundation
Pfeiffer-Lincoln Foundation
Michigan Arts & Culture Council
Anonymous Donor
For more updates, be sure to follow HAS HEART on Instagram and Facebook, sign-up for our newsletter, and bookmark the Coffee Shop page for more info over the coming months.
