We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alizeh Siddiqui and Matt Earl a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alizeh & Matt, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

We came up with the idea for Common Ground Projects out of necessity — and a longing for a third space where everyone felt welcome in South Mississippi.

Alizeh is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and Matt is from Australia. We met in Sydney in 2016, where café culture is a massive part of life. Every neighborhood has these intentional spaces that bring people together over good quality coffee and conversation. We later moved to Los Angeles in 2019 for Matt’s career in film and television, directing food docuseries, and making friends in hospitality along the way. During that time, we would travel back to Ocean Springs to visit Alizeh’s family and found that there were not many creative spaces to work from / most local gathering spaces were centered around alcohol, bars, and casinos.

We found ourselves missing that everyday sense of community – the kind that feels both creative and comforting and allows you to cross paths with people you may not have otherwise. We realized there wasn’t a space like that yet in Ocean Springs.

This fed into what started as Alizeh’s mom’s idea, inspired by her love of cooking, gathering, and culture, quickly evolving into something much bigger. Chef Fariha (or Amma to us) was in the beginning stages of opening a lifelong dream of hers – a restaurant. She has no culinary business background, but oh my god can she cook! She approached Matt to help design her restaurant (By The Fig & The Olive) which evolved into both of us helping build an entire wellness space, to then being included in the business plan to open a coffee shop right next door to the restaurant. Neither of us had any experience in hospitality — just a shared vision and a drive to create something that brought people together and to nourish them with quality ingredients and flavors that were not accessible in South Mississippi.

The concept naturally took shape: an Australian-style café infused with South Asian teas, flavors, and traditions. A place that blends global inspiration with small-town soul. The result is a space that feels warm, intentional, and culturally rich — where masala chai meets flat whites, and where community has a space to gather and connect. We called it Common Ground Projects because we wanted it to be more than a coffee shop. It’s a hub for collaboration and creativity — a space where people can meet, build, and share. From supper clubs and markets to book clubs, workshops, and vendor pop-ups, everything we do is about fostering connection.

At its core, Common Ground Projects is about people. It’s about creating a space where everyone feels known, where important community discussions can take place, where creativity feels accessible, and where something beautiful can grow from the ground up. Hearing that people know each other because they met at Common Ground Projects is our biggest achievement.

People have long carried certain ideas about Mississippi – about its food, its people, and its possibilities. Common Ground Projects was built to expand that narrative. To show that this can be a place of warmth and creativity, where quality and care coexist, and where everyone has the right to feel safe, seen, and part of something meaningful.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Matt comes from a background in film and television, and Alizeh comes from a background in sustainability, and we literally fell into the hospitality space by happenstance. We both have a shared passion for food, design, and travel, ultimately pulling from our experiences and bringing it into a physical space.

It was important to us that Common Ground Projects felt instantly recognizable – a brand that speaks with intention and looks like it knows what it’s doing – because at the start there…there was a lot to learn! We wanted every detail to feel cohesive, from the way our space looks to the way our community experiences it, so people know that whatever they’re getting, whether it is coffee, conversation, or collaboration – it is made to a certain standard.

We have been super intentional about every aspect of our business, including what we serve to our community, and bringing in our community in LA. Our coffee, Amigo Roasters, comes from a friend’s multigenerational family farm in Comosagua, El Salvador. Not only is the quality of the beans the best we’ve ever tasted, but they also supply us with single-origin, traceable coffee, improving coffee’s traditional supply chain and supporting the local community. So, we get to support our friends business, while also feeling aligned with their ethical approach to farming and fostering community enrichment.

We also sell another friend’s chocolate chip cookies and ube brownies, who owns a bakery in Long Beach, CA called Foodologie. She is Filipina and has inspired us to make one of our most popular drinks, the ube latte! We love introducing our community to new flavor profiles, and honoring the cultures that these ingredients and recipes come from.

Alizeh is first generation Pakistani-American, and has remained true to the culture behind the cup of tea. Instead of a golden milk or turmeric latte, we’ve chosen to call it by its traditional name – haldi doodh (haldi meaning turmeric, and doodh meaning milk).

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Other than our menu, what sets us apart from others is how we run our business remotely. Almost everyone we know is surprised that we still live in LA, but run a coffee shop in Mississippi.

Absentee owners is an insane term, because we feel like we have to be more present and aware than ever when operating from across the country! From inventory, to accounting, to social media we do it all from California – traveling back and forth from CA to MS with our dog in tow quite a bit.

It’s definitely an unconventional way to work but with family right next door, an amazing team, and the wonders of modern technology it seems to be working for us.

Social media has been where we connect most with our audience. Our tone of voice, color palette, and graphic style are distinct – designed to cut through the noise and feel unmistakably us. Now that we’ve been open for over a year, we’re ready to expand that identity in new directions, working side by side with our community to shape what comes next.

We’ve done merch drops, hosted DJs, and collaborated with local artists: from pop-ups for kids to custom ceramics and hand-built lighting fixtures. We even bring in the work of friends from Australia and Los Angeles. It’s wild in the best way — all these corners of the globe, somehow converging right here in Ocean Springs, MS.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building a social presence takes consistency and intention. We’ve never wanted to post just to fill the feed, but staying top of mind really does make a difference. Social media is the new storefront window – a place to share knowledge, invite curiosity, and show people a feeling rather than a product.

Matt’s background in film and advertising definitely helps. Having someone that knows how to take good photos or tell a story is massive for your brand. When socials are handled by multiple parties, we feel like the vibe can be inconsistent, so establish what you like and gradually evolve your look and feel – it will take a while no matter how solid your brand identity is to begin!

We feel as though with tech at our disposal now there are a lot of ways to make do with what you have. Have an iPhone? Amazing – learn how light works and how to get the best images possible out of it. If not, get a film camera for cheap and make that your aesthetic. Find some way of creating a consistent way of updating your customers stylistically, rather than just jumping in front of them with new items or announcements.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We’re married, which ends up being a pretty great setup. People love to warn you not to mix business and relationships, but we’ve always done everything together, so it works for us. There’s a level of trust that makes it easy to be direct — we can call things how we see them, throw out ideas at any hour, and build off each other’s strengths.

A lot of what you see in the space comes from shared experiences – designs inspired by past travels, small details shaped by things we’ve learned together. Common Ground Projects really is a reflection of both of us, not in a corny way, just in the sense that it grew naturally out of the life we already share.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thecommongroundprojects.com
• Instagram: commonground.ms
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Common-Ground-Projects-61557757208835/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/common-ground-projects-ocean-springs

Image Credits
Image Credits: Matthew Earl, Andrew Duong, and Cody Russell