Coal Creek Urgently Needs Your Help

Dear Coal Creek friends,

We are coming to you with an urgent request for your financial support. We have been so grateful over the past 30 years to become your community gathering place and consider you all a part of our family. We’ve watched our children and yours grow up and come to work with us, we’ve been present as some of you find your life partners here and we’ve witnessed the tumult of our time outside our windows while being a safe space for people to witness and discuss challenging things with the community. It’s been a privilege to be a part of it and we want that to continue. We mean it when we say we are the “Home for Malcontents, Revolutionaries and Do-Gooders of all types.”

Asking for your assistance is both humbling and the circumstances painful. As many of you know, the businesses were hit hard by the pandemic with shut downs, really slow days, changes to staffing, supply chains issues and price increases that exceeded our past experience. We were successful in receiving some financial assistance from governmental programs, but we also had to seek a number of loans that are now due and the ripple effects of the pandemic have yet to fully resolve on a business level. We’ve seen costs for utilities double, staffing costs to provide living wages increase and the cost of goods rise in some areas by as much as 50%. We worked hard to keep our business running and staff employed while we worked through all the pandemic challenges. As a result we have fully utilized all of our personal financial resources to stay on top of business. Unfortunately, the next few months are some of the slowest of the year and we don’t have the resources to cover the gap. This money will help us bridge the gap and pay the critical expenses of staff, utilities and supplies for the next few months while business picks up going into summer.

We have been working to address the shortfall going forward with changes to pricing, staffing and suppliers, but we have a critical need for help in the meanwhile. It’s hard for us to ask for this kind of help in part because it feels like we have failed but we also know that some of you would feel the same type of loss that we will if we can’t continue so we have decided to push back our feelings and ask for your help. We hope that you will consider coming in for a coffee or beer or ordering some coffee online and please make a contribution to our Go Fund Me campaign so that we can continue to serve you now and in the future.

Humbly, Jodi and John Guerin