Avenue Coffee serves up lattes, goodwill in the University District

The idea may have begun in Italy: caffé sospeso, or "suspended coffee." It's also known as "pending coffee," but the idea is the same--you pay for your own coffee and an extra. The second transaction is suspended, unfinished, until someone less fortunate comes in and asks for a suspended coffee. Similar gifts have been reported--for example, as a customer in a drive-thru line pays for the order of the person in line behind.
 
No matter how you look at it, it's the golden rule in action. And that rule is part of the philosophy behind Avenue Coffee, opened last month at 786 Echles Street, where it intersects with Douglass Avenue in a neighborhood of single-family homes in the University District. The café is the vision of six students from Mid-South Christian College and the Visible School. It's a venture that focuses not just on locally roasted coffee and a communal, familiar, coffeehouse feel, but also on doing good.
 
"It's a nonprofit coffee shop with a focus on starting conversations and raising awareness about real issues," says Co-founder Nicolas Griffin. "Every month we're focusing in on a different social cause and will try to keep it as local as possible with a nonprofit or ministry that is doing something about that cause. We'll give a portion of our proceeds to them as well as gearing a lot of things in the shop toward raising awareness about those issues."
 
The causes will ramp up in August and focus on clean water with the organization ActiveWater, a nonprofit using grassroots campaigns to deliver clean water to communities around the globe.
 
Avenue Coffee supports local craftspeople and serves Reverb Coffee, which has a like-minded mission and a vision to partner directly with coffee growers and "to establish orphanages, churches, community centers, etc. on the farm or in the area of the farm with the proceeds from the coffee that we sell from that farm."
 
Cupcakes, muffins and cookies are provided by Debbie's Heavenly Morsels, baked locally by Debbie Stephens.