We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carley Kammerer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carley below.

Carley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I was working with a young man I’ll refer to as Jay for confidentiality. He was actually the first client I’d had post-graduation. I was working as a Drop-In Advocate and Case Manager. We started working together in 2014, and he was in and out of several of our programs over the years. Finally, one day in 2018, he walked into the drop-in center and, in his booming voice, said, “Carley, I need your help. I’m homeless again”.

Something in me snapped a little. I couldn’t understand how after four years of working the system together, Jay was still unstably housed and finding himself relapsing back into homelessness. When I started considering the trends I witnessed with my clients, it was a consistent theme of them getting jobs quickly but facing too many barriers to maintaining long-term employment. It wasn’t that my clients didn’t want to work. It was that keeping a job long-term was really challenging. This struggle prohibited them from earning a consistent income enough to find stable housing and exit homelessness, leaving them trapped in cycles of poverty and housing instability.

I saw a gap in services designed to address this specific barrier. So I started envisioning a new solution- a business that would exist solely to cultivate the skills and support youth needed to maintain stable employment and achieve a sustainable end to homelessness. This idea grew into a little coffee cart, a brick-and-mortar shop in South Minneapolis, and our newest expansion into St. Paul.

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

I have nearly a decade of experience working as a Case Manager, Shelter Advocate, and Street Outreach Worker in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Minnesota with youth experiencing homelessness. During this time, I witnessed my clients struggling with employment opportunities and stability. Clients excelled at getting jobs but lacked the skills and faced too many barriers to maintaining long-term employment. This struggle with employment prohibited them from earning a consistent income enough to find stable housing and exit homelessness, leaving them trapped in cycles of poverty and instability.

I saw a gap in services designed to address this specific barrier. So I started envisioning a new solution- a business that would exist solely to cultivate the skills and support youth needed to maintain stable employment and achieve a sustainable end to homelessness. This idea took root, and in 2017 my business partner and I opened Wildflyer Coffee as a small coffee cart, catering private events and doing Farmer’s Markets. In 2020 we opened our first brick-and-mortar coffee shop in South Minneapolis and are now close to opening a second location in St. Paul.

In the Wildflyer program, youth aged 16-24 with histories of housing instability participate in a four-month job training program to develop the necessary personal and professional skills to transition into long-term employment and stability. Employees work approximately 20 hours weekly in the coffee shop, where they experience hands-on learning opportunities and individualized skills coaching. Participants also attend about five hours a month of programming designed to cultivate the additional personal skills needed to support leaving homelessness and finding stability.

I’m most proud of the community response we are creating to address a community problem. Youth homelessness is all our responsibility to solve, and wildflyer provides an accessible way to participate in that work. I’m also proud of my team, who works hard daily to provide a supportive, flexible, positive work experience. I think our success is reflected in our outcomes and positive feedback from youth who graduate from our program, find employment and housing, and come back to stay in touch!

Any advice for managing a team?

This has been a hard one for me! We’ve grown rapidly in the last two years, and I’ve found myself going from a one-woman solopreneur show to managing an entire leadership team, with each team member having their own direct reports they need support in managing. I’ll be the first to say I haven’t handled this exceedingly well, but I am learning and hopefully getting better at creating a healthy and positive work environment. Two lessons learned along the way:

1) Get to know your team. We did the Enneagram assessment once, and it was so eye-opening about what motivates each of us, what areas we need to feel validated in, and how we like to receive feedback and appreciation. This has allowed me to provide more personalized support and encouragement the right way, depending on each team’s specific wiring and unique needs. You can use many different assessments, but I recommend finding one and learning from it. You have to know each other well to do this work.

2) Slow down. I’m an entrepreneur and incredibly passionate about our mission, so I am used to working 60+ hour weeks and have been for several years. If you’re like me, you probably will make the mistake of thinking everyone is just as passionate and willing to work this hard. If you’re going to build a team, you’re going to have to realize that’s probably not true. Don’t get me wrong; my team is dedicated, passionate, and hard-working. However, that doesn’t mean they want their lives to revolve around Wildflyer, and that’s healthy and good! Because of this reality, it’s been vital for me to adjust my enthusiasm and expectations. It’s better to all arrive at the goal together rather than lose half of the team and the rest getting there half-dead and burnt out.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I think the best story that shows my resiliency is from 2021. We opened our shop in late December 2020, and in early 2021, I found myself unexpectedly getting divorced. So I was attempting to run a business I had just opened during a pandemic, and I also found myself suddenly dealing with the emotional fallout of a life-shattering event and the physical practicalities, like moving and navigating the legal system. This all came at the heels of an incredibly exhausting four-month push to open the shop.

I ended up having to take five weeks off. This felt crazy to me. I felt like I was abandoning something I had just started, but I was in no condition to work. I have never felt that burnt out, and I hope to never again. I ended up also dealing with about eight months of chronic illness due to the long-term stress I experienced. Looking back, I’m not positive how I made it through. All I know is I have an outstanding community who helped me through and learned to take care of myself first, something I had never done before but is critical if you’re going to sustain running a mission-driven business.

I’m proud I made it through and of what our team still accomplished despite this extreme adversity. Not only did we make it, but we positioned ourselves for incredible growth that will pay off in 2023. However, I hope never to experience so many stressful life events like that again!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wildflyercoffee.com
• Instagram: @wildflyercoffee
• Facebook: @wildflyercoffee
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carley-kammerer-10998399/

Image Credits
@annewosterphotography @mar_wei