Best Community Impact
COCO’s has been recognized by Small Business BC in the category of Best Community Impact. We would like to thank each of you for your support over the years and for helping bring our founding members vision to life!
Some of the reasons COCO’s has been recognized as a finalist for this award are:
Our Mission: to operate a successful social enterprise that provides employment, training and social opportunities for people with developmental disabilities within their community!
Our ability to grow our programs and fit the needs of people within our community who would otherwise be overlooked. We have been busy growing our support programs and expanding on the supported hours available for our staff member with developmental disabilities since 2011 (Wow, five years this June!). We are proud to announce that in 2015 we provided approximately 4800 supported hours, this is about 400 hours per month. An increase of 25% since 2014. In 2016 COCO’s hopes to roll out a new program that provides training, work experience, resume building and interview training for more individuals in our community. The number of applications we receive from people who would otherwise find it hard to find meaningful job opportunities exceeds our Café and Catering business’ requirements for long term permanent staff members. We hope this program will show an increase of 20% hours in 2016.
Here at COCO we are so thankful for the support we receive from our community, and we like to give back, too! For the past 3 years COCO Café has been involved with the Nanaimo Relay for life, an event that honors our loved ones touched by Cancer. In our second and third year of involvement COCO’s was able to sponsor the Survivors meal in full. We plan to grow our support for the Relay in the coming years.
Another way COCO’s helps with community impact is by making the greenest choices whenever possible. Restaurants produce a lot of waste, food waste in particular, to minimize our footprint in the landfills we save all of our food scraps for local farmers to pick up and feed to their livestock. We also make sure to separate all cardboard, paper, plastic and refundable recycling and dispose of each accordingly. We also include the option of reusable plates and cutlery for all of our catering clients.
For more information on COCO Cafe or any of our programs please have a look around our website or email us at info@cococafe.ca.
