Your family and close friends may tell you they love you, but does your barista say it after you order a latte?
Francois Reihani, the founder and CEO of La La Land Kind Cafe, estimates his employees—all former foster children who have aged out of the system—say “I love you” roughly 2 million times a year to customers across his 11 locations in Texas and California. And they will soon be saying it a lot more.
Reihani, a 2021 Forbes Under 30 Social Impact lister, announced that he has received $20 million investment from John Phelan, co-founder and chairman of Rugger Management, and Andy Teller, a private investor. The new valuation: $66 million.
“With this new investment, I think it’s a really big runway to be able to do what we want to do,” says Reihani.
A for-profit coffee shop with a cause, La La Land serves lavender lattes and avocado toasts in shops with white interiors and bright bright yellow branding. Employees behind the counter make drinks with bright yellow labels to match the decor and dawn messages like “normalize kindness” and “just be nice.”
Each employee goes through an eight-week training program, which offers alumni of state foster systems mentorship, therapy and life skill classes on top of cafe training. Upon completion of the program, the mentees decide whether they want to stay on as employees or pursue other careers.
For Ciara Watley, La La Land provided a job and community. Before she applied for a job in the cafe in 2019, Watley was 19 and homeless.
“I never thought that I would’ve made it past 21,” says Watley, now 23. “I always thought that I was either going to kill myself or end up overdosing on drugs.”
With no work experience, and little hope, she applied to La La Land. To her surprise, she was told she was perfect for the job and hired at their first location on Bell Ave in Dallas. Says Watley, “We really had a great community where it felt like a family.”
Growing up in Rosario, Mexico, Reihani remembers how sad it made him to see the number of orphaned homeless children around him. He had sold his shares of his first business, Pōk The Raw Bar in Dallas while studying at the Southern Methodist University School of Business. After hearing about it at a dinner with his sister and her friend who was a volunteer for Dallas Court Appointed Special Associates (CASA), an organization which protects abused and neglected children, he attended a meeting. At the meeting several former foster youths shared their horror stories from their foster experience including pregnancy, drug rings and prostitution rings. The experience stayed with him.
In 2017, Reihani founded the We Are One Project, a non-profit that offers mentoring, therapy sessions, life skill classes, stable housing, and help with college for aged-out foster youth. The only missing piece was job placement, so the cafe sought to bridge that gap.
Service industries like cafes and restaurants have found it challenging to hire and retain talented staff. For Reihani, there is an extra layer of complexity hiring veterans of the foster system, many who have experienced traumas in their lives. To give workers extra support, Rehani employs a youth director who guides them through life skills like laundry, public transportation, personal problems and anything else non-work related. Even if the aged-out youth leaves the company, the youth director is still available to talk to them no matter how long it has been. “I don’t know if I would call any of it a risk,” says Reihani, “we don’t see it that way.”
Beyond expanding his cafe to new locations, Reihani wants to promote La La Land’s business model to inspire other brands to train and hire at-risk workers. Thus far, Reihani has begun discussions with Walmart and Public Storage about incorporating similar programs for foster youth into their strategies.
“Not every youth is always going to want to work in a coffee shop,” says Reihani. “It’s more so about ‘how do we solve the problem as a whole?’”
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