For an increasingly large number of people, the day hasn’t truly begun before drinking their morning cup of coffee. According to a 2012 study, UK consumers spent £941 on coffee in just one year. On top of this, the popularity of Fairtrade coffee has been increasing rapidly over the past fifteen years, which shows consumers are not just filling up on caffeine, but wanting to know their product is ethically sound. It is with this in mind, that a new brand of coffee called Change Please hopes to succeed.

Change Please is a project aimed at employing and training people who are homeless to become baristas. Launching in London today, a number of small trucks, in different locations around the capital, will be selling ethically sourced coffee at £2.50 per cup. The baristas are trained, provided with housing and paid £9.15 per hour – the London Living Wage – and after six months on the job, gaining valuable experience and skills, Change Please will look to help them take another step up the ladder into a job at a well established coffee shop.

Cemal Ezel, who is the co-founder of the Old Spike Roastery – a coffee shop in Peckham that provides homeless people with jobs, housing and training – started the project alongside John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue magazine. The scheme is starting small, but Ezel hopes to have about 100 ex-homeless people involved by next year, and is looking to expand into other cities around the country. He said, “By providing both a job and housing we are immediately lifting people out of homelessness” and “we guarantee that this programme will make a significant contribution to helping alleviate the homeless problem across the country”.

Homelessness is a real problem in the UK. A study by the charity Crisis shows that, “after years of declining trends, all forms of homelessness have risen due to the shortage of housing and ongoing effects of the economic recession combined with government policies.” The report states that 7,851 people slept rough at some point in the year 2014/15 in London, which is more than double the number five years previously.

For more information about Change Please, and to get inspired by their great work, check out their Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/ChangePlease