Our Story
Come in for the coffee.
Fall in love with the mission.
Coffee Uniting People is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit hiring people with and without disabilities at six Tampa Bay coffee shops. Our team is the brand. Everything else follows from that.
2021 — The Beginning
A coffee shop built around a problem nobody else was solving.
Greg and Laura Jones spent years coaching Challenger Baseball, a disability-inclusive league in Tampa. They watched dozens of athletes age out of youth services and run into the same wall: nobody was hiring.
The first CUP opened its doors that year. The pitch was simple — a real coffee shop, hiring real teams of people with and without disabilities, paying real wages. The community showed up. Then it kept showing up.
The Model
Forty teammates. One bar. Side-by-side.
CUP teams are intentionally mixed. Baristas with and without disabilities pull shots, plate pastries, train new hires, and run service together. The model isn’t a program. It’s a workplace.
Forty-plus team members work across our six Tampa Bay shops. The general manager, Stephanie Williams, came up through the team. The training is rigorous and the standards are high — and that’s the point.
The future is inclusive. We just opened a coffee shop to prove it.
2025 → Onward
Six locations across Tampa Bay, and growing.
CUP now operates the South Tampa flagship on Dale Mabry, two locations in the BayCare Health hospital system, a downtown shop at EMBARC Collective, and a Tampa General Hospital partnership.
Our coffee is roasted, packed, and shipped by our team in Tampa — and every bag sold funds the next hire, the next training, the next location.
What's Next
More cups. More cities. Same standard.
We’re not done. The roadmap calls for more Tampa Bay locations, deeper hospital partnerships, and a wholesale program that sends CUP coffee to offices and venues that share the mission.
The bar — for both the coffee and the workplace — keeps getting higher. That’s how it should be.
Get In Touch
Coffee Uniting People, Inc.
PO Box 10249, Tampa, FL 33679
501(c)(3) nonprofit · FL Reg. #CH67895