Support our mission
Help us keep Austin weird
To us, a weird Austin is one where creative people can afford a creative lifestyle. It is a place where people have enough peace of mind to dream, enough free time to make, and enough opportunity to participate in an urban village economy. A weird Austin has a culture, and it’s shaped by the people who live here.
Your private donations enable us to support this mission in the following ways:
Provide affordable retail space for makers via our consignment and pop-up programs
Actively promote local artists and brands
Sponsor and facilitate one-off events such as markets and group shows
Incentivize creative leadership within our community
Surface work and collaboration opportunities to community members
Facilitate regular creative meetups for artists and musicians
Employ creative people and create meaningful leadership opportunities for a diverse staff
One year of coffee
Donate any amount over $5.00 to receive our One Year of Coffee coupon card in the mail.
We can’t ask our staff to work for free, and we can’t invest so much that we hurt the business. Private donations put slack in our leash and help us serve the community more effectively.
Grey Wilson
Director of Community
Grey stepped into this role April 1st to help us manage artist relationships. This includes simplifying our consignment process, helping artists onboard into the program, maintaining inventory systems, etc.
Grey is a fantastic designer with a background in event organizing. They are full of great ideas, and we’d to see them run with those! Grey kindly agreed to work within our budget, but we are very eager to grow our budget so we can work with them more!
Rachel Ickler
Admin & Analyst
Dear Diary’s senior barista aspires to be an analyst one day, and she definitely has the mind for it! She asks fantastic questions, enjoys problem solving, and a wiz with numbers.
Starting April 1st, Rachel will calculate payroll and consignment payouts. She will also take on self-assigned finance projects to develop her skills as an analyst. Her career development coincides with our aspirations for the charitable arm of our business, and all the accounting overhead that will come along with it!
Colleen Hippard
Shop Manager
Colleen’s has an amazing knack for hiring in good people, and we owe our present assortment of talent and personality to her. Generally speaking, she makes sure the coffee business is humming along so we have time and resources to invest in community programs. This is an incredible amount of responsibility, and Colleen is truly a one-in-a-million kind of person. Private donations take some of the pressure off the coffee business (and Colleen!) to back our desired level of community engagement and impact.
Amalia Litsa
Owner
Dear Diary Coffee is an S-Corp, meaning Litsa is a salaried employee and receives a W2 just like her staff. Before April 1st, Litsa managed most aspects of the art programs herself. She saw an opportunity to shift these responsibilities to her staff in a way that would advance their careers. She also recognized Dear Diary’s community programs would greatly benefit from their talents. Litsa is a very hands-on owner, and steps in to support the team as necessary. Her primary focus, though, is shaping the businesses and opening revenue channels to sustain it.
The primary disadvantage is overhead. Significantly more administrative hours are needed to maintain two business entities. Dear Diary Coffee can invest in community services, accept donations, and even form a board of advisors without official non-profit status. We are most likely to form a non-profit after our revenue would cover the cost. This is another reason we really appreciate your donations.
Non profit Status
Dear Diary Coffee is currently an S-Corp / LLC owned by Amalia Litsa.
The easiest path to non-profit status would be to separate Dear Diary’s charitable arm into its own non-profit business entity. This new organization would have no owner, and would be controlled by a board of directors (Texas Business Organizations Code Chapter 22).
This has some key advantages:
Private donors could become members of the non-profit organization
Grey would have the help of a board of directors
Dear Diary Coffee could more easily quantify its charitable donations
Our programs would qualify for public grants
Our business structure would better match our relationship to the community
Thank you for supporting our ongoing effort to preserve
Austin’s creative culture
Our Values
Creativity
In many ways, creativity is an outcome of emotional safety. Connecting with others over creative activity is such a special phenomenon given so many people find their creative safe space in solitude. We try our best to create safety for our staff, customers, vendors, and community by practicing kindness and openness, and by seeking diversity.
Trust
Barista work is so team-oriented, it’s impossible to enjoy the job without trust. As such, our team is tiny, but highly collaborative. We exercise a lot of transparency, from day-to-day FYIs to quarterly financial status updates. Our trust comes from a place of mutual respect, and the distribution of leadership within our team is a reflection of that. The transparency required of non-profits would be a natural and easy extension what we already do.
Community
We are employed by our neighbors. 100% of our revenue comes from simple people, most of whom live within walking distance of us. Because we are so accessible, we are far more likely to respond to the needs of not just our customers, but everyone who comes into contact with us. Relationship-building is almost too easy given our shared experience of living and working in Austin.
Get involved
Let us know if you think you can help us reach our community impact goals.
programs@deardiary.coffee