Reasons To Be Cheerful · 9 hours ago

The Coffee Academy Serving up Career Paths

When a free barista training program offered Sana Pishgoo - a refugee who had fled Iran after losing custody of her daughter, then lost her bakery job in the pandemic - a way back to herself, she took it. Well Grounded, a U.K. social enterprise now a decade old, has trained over 1,200 people by pairing practical coffee skills with something harder to teach: the belief that a path forward exists. "I properly learned how to make coffee," Pishgoo says, "but I also learned how to be confident as a business owner, and that if you have a dream, you can achieve it." Her north London patisserie, named for the Persian city where she once ran her own café, has become a neighborhood staple - and her daughter, now studying at Oxford, has put in a birthday request for mango cake. The story of Well Grounded is ultimately about what becomes possible when practical support meets the stubborn human instinct to begin again.