Every morning the line in front of Dr. Jack’s Coffeehouse stretches across the student center as students line up to get their fix of Starbucks brand coffee. Beginning next semester, however, the Starbucks will be no more.
When students return in August, the coffee available at Dr. Jack’s will be coffee with a cause. All the new coffee will be made from original recipes specific to Ouachita, and every purchase of the coffee will help support an orphanage in Honduras that is part of the World Gospel Outreach (WGO) ministry.
“It started last summer when we were getting ready to open the new coffee shop,” said Dr. Brett Powell, vice president for administrative services. “We knew we needed a name for the shop to give it some kind of identity, so we had a couple of meetings just to think through what name to put on the coffee shop, and Dr. Jack’s came out of that.
“After we got the name and the logo it was just such a neat concept that we started thinking about what else we could do with it.”
Around the time that the planning for Dr. Jack’s took place, Enactus, a student organization with the school of business, was working on a project with WGO.
“WGO is a Christian organization that operates a mission house and an orphanage in Honduras,” said Judith Brizuela, senior psychology and business major and president of Enactus. “The organization’s work is supported through the sale of coffee grown at the orphanage. In addition to creating a small business curriculum for local entrepreneurs, our Enactus team wanted to help WGO sell more coffee so that it could to support more orphans.”
“With the work that Enactus was doing with WGO, and us thinking about coffee for Dr. Jack’s, we just made the connection that maybe there’s someway we could find a way to sell coffee that has some kind of purpose behind it,” Powell said. “Every time a student buys a cup, something happens that does some good.”
The new recipes will be created this summer. Although it will not be the Starbucks everyone is used to, students can rest assured that the Honduran coffee is of good quality, and since the coffee is coming from the WGO ministry, they can be sure that it is fair trade.
Since these will be original recipes made specifically for Ouachita, the bookstore will sell packaged versions of the coffee so students can have their morning coffee in the dorm room without having to walk all the way to Dr. Jack’s.
“We’ve met with a couple of different people who work in the coffee industry to see how we might be able to do all this and create our own recipes, what help we need and what we can do on our own,” Powell said. “Now we’re working on branding and the packaging for the coffee.”
The new coffee will add to the unique identity of Ouachita and Dr. Jack’s.
“It gives us a way to connect outside the university and it helps the students to see that we’re doing something other than just serving ourselves, that we’re serving other people through the things that we do,” Powell said. “I’m just looking forward to drinking a cup of the new Dr. Jack’s coffee.”
