Last year was rough for Rose Hanks: The Navy veteran and her children struggled to find steady housing and ended up homeless for six months.
“I’d tell anybody that 2024 was one of the worst years of my life,” said the 42-year-old, who was a Navy deck seaman.
Now, Hanks has the first job she’s ever really loved, along with steady housing. She works in the Loop as a lead barista at Veteran Roasters, a small nonprofit coffee company dedicated to hiring at-risk and homeless military veterans.
The organization has big plans to expand into Pullman with a 16,000-square-foot coffee roastery, retail cafe, restaurant and brewery, where it will hire more veterans.
“They’re giving back to veterans,” Hanks said. “I’ve been in those shoes, I was a homeless veteran, and I did have to reach out, and I was given help. There’s a lot of different programs that I had zero clue about.”
Hanks started with Veterans Affairs, which helped her find housing in a renovated two-flat with a wrap-around front porch and a back yard that she loves. And they connected her with Veteran Roasters and its founders, Mark and Kip Doyle.
The couple’s coffee company has its roots in their apparel company, Rags of Honor, which they founded a decade ago. Mark Doyle, now 68, had returned from Afghanistan, where he had served as a civilian contractor.
“In Chicago, there were 2,000 homeless veterans, and it just seemed to me that … well, I understood the war effort,” said Doyle, a political consultant. “… People who wore the uniform shouldn’t be living in shelters and shouldn’t be living on the street, and so I just wanted to do something locally to make a difference.”
After finding success with Rags of Honor, the Doyles went into the coffee business. Last fall, they opened the cafe where Hanks works at 161 N. Clark St. and another at Gate K15 in Terminal 3 in O’Hare International Airport.
The Doyles don’t take a salary, and both businesses employ at-risk, homeless veterans in the Chicago area. Revenues pay workers’ wages or are donated to help homeless veterans nationwide.
The couple partners with A Safe Haven, a foundation that helps those experiencing housing and financial insecurity. A Safe Haven also provides veteran services and housing.
“We are working hand in hand together to help people trying to stabilize their lives,” said Mark Mulroe, president of A Safe Haven. “It was always a natural partnership.
“At the core is serving those who served us,” Mulroe said. “These veterans gave up a portion of their lives to keep us safe … it’s even more important to help them when they are struggling.”
All seven employees at the Doyles’ two nonprofits are veterans. And since starting Rags of Honor and venturing into the coffee business with partners like local roaster Big Shoulders, the Doyles have employed more than 100 veterans over the last decade.
From working at the Loop cafe, Hanks says she’s become obsessive about the coffee industry, and it’s all she talks about with friends. “Once I got trained, picked up on everything, now it’s like, coffee is my life.
“Everything fell in place for me at the right time,” she said. “This is probably the first job where I don’t dread coming to work in the morning.”
The idea for a big expansion into Pullman came during former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration when the Doyles applied for neighborhood opportunity funds to enable them to build a facility on vacant land at 754 E 111th St.
Neighborhood opportunity funding was created in 2016 to promote equitable development in underserved commercial corridors, like on the South and West sides, by leveraging funds from high-end downtown developments.
“I hired a lot of people over the years who’ve lived down in Bronzeville and south, and transportation is a killer for people trying to find good work,” Mark Doyle said. “It was an opportunity for us to move into a location where it was needed.”
The pandemic put the Pullman cafe, roastery, restaurant and brewpub on hold. Since then, in addition to the $2 million in neighborhood opportunity funds, the Doyles have obtained federal and state new market tax credits, a state grant and another $1 million in city funding that was approved in March.
They hope for a soft opening late this year for what they temporarily are calling Pullman Brewpub and Cafe.
About 50 more veterans will be employed at the new facility, Doyle said.
But Veteran Affairs job cuts by the Trump administration have the Doyles concerned. “I get calls more and more lately, and my worry is that … we will start to see homelessness and suicides again start to rise,” Mark Doyle said.
“It’s so precarious, we call it the flat tire syndrome,” said Kip Doyle. “Where it’s like that one more thing, and the tire goes flat, and then their whole world collapses because then they can’t get to a job, they can’t get that paycheck.”
Dion West, director of logistics for the Doyles’ coffee company, returned from the Marines in 2012 and became homeless after caring for his dying father.
“My last mission was a humanitarian mission for Haiti, which put me in a rough spot when it came to medicine,” West said. “I just saw a little bit too much.”
He found a men’s veterans facility and heard about Rags of Honor. “I just felt like, no matter what happens with this company, you have to hire me … the mission is about helping people, and I needed a mission,” West said. “I needed something to focus on. I needed something to drive me and get me up in the morning.”
“It’s not just employment,” West said. “You see a progression over the months. I know it because I went through it firsthand, and when I came in, I was just defeated.”
