HAMILTON, Ohio — For the first time in months, the Fringe Coffee House kitchen is buzzing. After a temporary closure, employees are busier than ever, shuttling cup after cup of lattes, teas and espressos out to their new, larger lounge while managing a new drive-thru window.
For founder Patrick Davis, it’s a big step forward, ensuring his business and his mission while being able to survive and even grow to meet the need in Hamilton and beyond.
The business began with a vision. Davis wanted to create a place where everyone on “the fringe” of society could feel welcome and a path forward for those who may feel isolated from their community.
He opened Fringe in Oct. 2020, as a coffee house and re-entry/work training program. Everyone he hired was either previously incarcerated or faced other significant barriers to employment.
“People are isolated when they’re in prison and a coffee shop is a community space, it’s a way to kind of welcome them back to the community and get them around people,” he said. “Unless you’ve been to prison, you wouldn’t really fully understand it.”
Davis himself spent four years in juvenile detention after a drug deal gone wrong devolved into violence. He was initially arrested for aggravated robbery and kidnapping.
“My situation was horrible,” he said. “If I wasn’t as strong as I was mentally and spiritually. That causes a lot of people to just give up.”
While he was in prison, Davis’s brother was murdered at 20 years old. After that, Davis resolved he wasn’t going to waste his life behind bars. He found his faith, worked on his mental and spiritual health, and resolved to find honest work when he got out.
Then, when he did, he found few places were willing to give him a second chance.
“I didn’t have anybody offering me a job,” he said. “I didn’t have a community.”
He founded Fringe to provide the opportunities and guidance he couldn’t find and in its first few years of operation; he said the community rallied around his vision.
“We had like a thousand people show up to the opening,” he said.
Though as time went on, it became clear the Fringe Coffee House had its limits.
“The accessibility of the building, the parking wasn’t that great, there was no drive-thru you had to cut through a couple alleys to get there,” Davis said.
It was holding the business back, preventing them from hosting the events they wanted and keeping customers away, so Davis made a difficult decision. The business would temporarily close while Fringe moved into a bigger and better space.
“Every day that we weren’t open, I was stressing about, you know, how are they going to pay their bills, though we did make sure everybody had a job,” he said.
It was a temporary fix until December when Fringe moved into its new space at 604 High St. with space for events, a drive-thru, and the opportunity to double its staff.
“We’re now going to be able to have twice as many people go through the program that really, they really need this opportunity,” Davis said.
Now, Davis is working on training a new batch of employees with high hopes for the business to grow over the next few years, spreading his mission through similar programs across Ohio.
“Those people that are really good, we would like to be able to send them and say, ‘Hey here’s a big jump in pay, we want you to run the one in Cincinnati or in Cleveland or Dayton,’” he said. “We’ll get this thing stable first and then move on from there.”