The House Cafe Endowed Fund

The House Café started as a youth game night at our local community center.  In 2010, when we originally took over this game night, we worked with a handful (6-10) students in grades 7-12.  In 2021 we still continue this community game night, which is open to all kids in our community, and it has grown to 10-20 students in k-5th grade as well as 25-40 students in 6-12th grade. 

As more kids in our community began coming, we witnessed almost all of our students repeat the cycle and culture of poverty they grew up in. By 2015 students were dropping out of school, actively using drugs, going to jail, or living at home unemployed after graduation.  Seeing this cycle led us to pray about how to help our kids break out of the cycle of poverty, which in our town has proven to be multi-generational.  Out of this prayer, we built the coffee shop and a teen center, hosted many community events, and now believe the Lord is leading us to open a preschool program. 

What we have learned is that while we have a great influence on the k-12 students in Ogden, the poverty mentality is truly formulated in the under six years old stage of development.  While the coffee shop provides our students with scholarships, internships, recreational activities, mentoring, tutoring, and more, we are finding the environment our kids come from is highly influential.  Out of this conviction, we believe that pulling kids aged 2-6 out of that environment and providing a structured curriculum will help our students socially, academically, and behaviorally.  Researchers have found that by three years old, low-income children have heard 30 million fewer words than students from higher-income homes.  This results in a development gap that “grows exponentially in the early years, such that by age five, less than half of children growing up in low-income families are ready for school compared with 75% of children raised in higher-income families.”  (school readiness of poor children, 2012).  We have personally seen many of our students struggle with school as early as kindergarten, our program and involvement with the teens are having an effect, but in many cases, we are still seeing the cycle of poverty continue due to the large academic and developmental gap developed by age six as well as the pressures of the environment these kids grow up in or around.

Our goal is to shift the culture of our community away from one where poverty prevails and teach students to be future leaders and contributors to our society, equipped with the tools and knowledge to achieve their potential. Each area of influence we have is developed to confront behaviors of poverty and instill behaviors of independence and resiliency.

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