Please Help a Beloved Small Business and Family Stay Afloat!

My name is Alisha and I'm starting this fundraiser for Pekoe Sip House. My fiance, Jeff, and I purchased Pekoe one month before the Covid pandemic. We had two locations; one on the CU-Boulder campus and one on Alpine and Broadway in Boulder, Colorado.

A bit about myself; I come from a very judgmental family and have suffered a lot of trauma due to the practice of shunning or disfellowshipping. I was assaulted and also lost my entire family and nearly everyone I had known during my early life. I faced homelessness, but battled back and put myself through Culinary Arts School.

In 2019, my goal was to have a business that would be accepting of everyone. I really wanted to be part of a community and have a sense of purpose, so Jeff and I created a relaxing environment in our cafes where people could stay as long as they wanted. We are a welcome part of the local Boulder community; kids come to our cafes after school and enjoy our space while waiting to meet their parents, college students and CU faculty enjoyed our cafe to study and socialize. In addition, we wanted to be an employer that paid our employees a living wage and provided them with insurance. These are things we accomplished, despite being unable to receive any covid relief or financial aid, as we had opened our business as the pandemic was beginning. The first two years of our four year lease with CU we could not operate due to Covid restrictions. Our second two years at the CU location, we performed very well as a business and put up excellent numbers while becoming a favorite cafe for students and faculty alike.

On July 15th we received an email from CU stating our lease was up on August 31st and CU inquired if we wanted to be considered for renewing our lease. Since we were closed the first two years of our lease, Jeff immediately went to the head of the CU Real Estate Board, Mark Gross, to find out more information. Mark said they might be going in a different direction and that the Real Estate Board should have contacted us six months ago. He said he would be in touch, but it was clear he didn't have time to listen to what we had been through and what this place meant to us and the community. On July 17th, we received an email stating that we had nothing to worry about and that CU was expecting to renew our lease. Planning for the upcoming school year, we hired 14 CU students to work in our CU cafe in preparation for the influx of students on August 15th. We became concerned as the renewal date came closer and we had not heard anything from the CU Real Estate Board despite inquiring through many emails, including several from our lawyer. We finally found out on July 31st, that a new tenant for the cafe had approached our cafe Manager and had offered her a job. Later that day, we received a letter from CU stating that we had two weeks to vacate the premises. This was the worst day of our lives; we had to lay off the entire staff we had just hired days before. We are reeling in disbelief that we were blindsided after receiving the email stating we had nothing to worry about.

Our business has served as a small business incubator for the local community and our commercial kitchen space is home to a few up and coming businesses. Due to CU pulling the rug out from under us, we now have to close our commercial kitchen space, crippling these small businesses and putting their businesses at risk of closing. The loss of our CU cafe has also put us in extreme financial turmoil at our Alpine and Broadway location and this is the major impetus of this GoFundMe effort. We are a loved establishment in the Boulder community, but without some financial help, we will have to close soon. My hope is that those of you who read this and can empathize with our current situation, or are simply supporters of small business, will come forward and help us to stay open and continue to serve our commununity.