Offering hope to strangers and fostering friendships through coffee and conversation is the mission ofWhen Singleton was a child, his father, Jim, went to jail for the first of many times, eventually ending up on the streets with a heroin addiction. In 2010, a group of pastors came upon Jim in front of the
. “They found my dad on the street, they shared a cup of coffee together and brought him to a recovery centre — and changed his life,” Singleton says.After Jim’s untimely death in a workplace accident in 2015, Singleton didn’t want his father’s transformation to be in vain. In 2016, he and his wife, Steph, started giving away coffee outside the Drop-In Centre. In 2017, the couple started their own coffee company, Kingdom Coffee, from their garage.
Singleton says it all comes back to honouring his father’s legacy, and how he was able to come to a place of peace and recovery. “We want to encourage others in that as well,” he says. Get a weekly serving of suggestions for how to experience Calgary's restaurants, bars and markets by signing up forThis article appears in the November 2023 issue of Avenue Calgary.