Huntingdon, Pa. — Greg Anderson peers into a good cup of coffee and sees a rich, warm vision of community development in this little city in the mountains of south-central Pennsylvania.
With Jessie Anderson, his wife, he opened the Standing Stone Coffee Company here two and a half years ago on a threadbare block of Mifflin Street a few blocks from Juniata College, his alma mater. He had spent four years working in campus ministries at Penn State’s main campus, over in State College, and another four at Messiah College, in tiny Grantham, Pa., and he says he had seen “a continued breakdown in community”—especially a divide between college students and the longtime residents they lived among.
“My wife and I were trying to think what we could do to counteract that,” he says, and they decided to try recreating “the whole Cheers experience” in a coffee shop. “We wanted to create a space where college students and faculty and administrators could sit next to an average Joe who was rich in experience.” Like a good number of the patrons, many of the shop’s employees are students.
With its big, welcoming windows and its bold colors, the shop is a cheerful beacon in the neighborhood, attracting customers with not only coffee and baked goods but also with free wifi, public computers that local kids come use after school, and a laundromat. The shop offers frequent musical events, as well as trivia nights and opportunities to learn about making coffee and about international coffee economics. The Andersons are committed to buying and selling fair-trade coffee, as well as to purchasing local foods when they can.
But that’s only the beginning of Mr. Anderson’s vision for the shop. Now that its survival seems assured after a period of struggling to cover start-up costs—support from the college community was crucial, he says—the Andersons and their employees and friends have surveyed the neighborhood to find out what their neighbors’ needs and concerns are. The plan for the coming year is to hire a community-development director and pay that person’s salary out of the shop’s revenues. “You’ve gotta put your money where your mouth is,” says Mr. Anderson. “We hope the community honors that. The more people come in, the more we’ll be able to do.”
Among the elements of Standing Stone’s community-development program, he says, will be twice-a-month “15-percent days,” when portions of the shop’s sales will be set aside to benefit local organizations and a establish fund for development projects. The projects may include awards for “people who do something great for the community” and “action grants to trigger or start things”—or even to help local families renovate homes or meet other needs.
There will also be more in-shop events. “We’ve discovered that the shop is really good at advocacy and education,” whether by offering a meeting space or just promoting causes on cardstock table tents, Mr. Anderson says.
It hasn’t been easy attracting all of Standing Stone’s neighbors in for their first visits, he says, even though he’s tried to keep prices within everyone’s reach. “But if you have one person come in to do their laundry and have a good experience, they’re going to share that. And kids aren’t afraid to come in and use the computers and get a glass of water.” The lesson, he says, is simple: “All kinds of things can happen if you just know your neighbor.”
(Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)
