SSU alumni Luke Fleming '22 and Will Carlson '18 were featured in “New Sonoma County coffee shop seeks to uplift foster youth,” broadcast by CBS News Bay Area. According to the story, the two met as teenagers in their transitional foster home, and found their first employment as baristas in a coffee shop to be life changing.
"The ability to have a job kind of set, reset everything where it wasn't just that we were troubled youth, or foster youth. All of a sudden, we had jobs and cars and people who believed in us," Carlson said.
Carlson and Fleming are clinical social workers who started Shane’s Coffee to fulfill their lifelong passion for coffee and employ people with disabilities, mental illnesses, and those in the foster care system, the article said.
The two friends' coffee venture was also featured in a Press Democrat story on October 22, 2024.
According to their Shane's Coffee Facebook page, the coffee shop is planned to launch in August 2025.