Once a thriving, fair-trade coffee shop, La Salle’s Café Justo — both founded and run by students — served drinks and raised money for various community projects.

In recent years, it has slowly dwindled to more of an occasional pop-up.

Now, after months of hard work and an essential transformation, seniors and Co-Officers of Philanthropy Gabrielle Jones and David Sharyan are bringing it back as the Red and Blue Brew Café.

On Monday, Nov. 3, the Leadership team celebrated the Café’s soft launch, serving coffee, Italian sodas, and Falcon Fuels. It will be open to students and teachers during both lunches on Straight 7 and Red days and even parents at 8:30 a.m. on late start mornings. While they only accept cash and physical cards at the moment, Apple Pay will eventually be offered as well.

“I’m very happy to be working with Gabrielle as we spearhead this initiative,” Sharyan said. “I think she’s very passionate about that, and I’m so tremendously excited to join her in that passion.”

While in recent years it has been used sporadically by La Salle’s affinity groups and clubs for various fundraisers, Jones and Sharyan envisioned something more for the space — a deeply involved, consistent part of the community.

But to do so, they first felt that it needed a new name: the “Red and Blue Brew Café.”

The original Café Justo was founded in 2018 by a group of students returning from the El Otro Lado immersion. Using a grant from La Salle’s Dare to Dream initiative, they partnered with the Café Justo coffee company based in Chiapas, México to fund scholarships for other students interested in the immersion.

By revamping the program, however, the Café would no longer have that same relationship, and the Leadership team felt keeping the old name would be disingenuous. It meant something different to the people who created it, and they didn’t want to take that away.

So a rebrand was in order.

“It kind of emphasized this new chapter in the Café’s history,” Sharyan said. “It represents the new path that we hope to bring for this cafe.”

But making the Café operational again was no easy task.

“The process was a little rocky at first,” Sharyan said. “A lot of it, Gabrielle and I had to navigate without much prior instruction.”

One of the biggest problems, according to Director of Community and Student Leadership Mr. Quinn Peoples, was the budget — or, the lack thereof. To get the Café off the ground, it was pulled together from overflow earnings from previous programs in the year, which allowed them to plant some “seed money,” Mr. Peoples said.

Fortunately, by his calculations, most of that has already been made back.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, working on policy and structure and protocol as we look forward in the year,” Mr. Peoples said. “[We’re] looking to host some great programming for our community here.”

After successfully clearing the budget, purchasing supplies, and conducting a short test run last week, the team connected the espresso machine to the water lines and geared up for opening.

“We had a lot of different moving parts and a lot of different moving people to work with,” Jones said. “But starting November, we’re open the whole month.”

Looking ahead, the Leadership team would like to offer a wider community use of the space, opening it up to various other groups at La Salle. However, it will still be some time before that’s possible, as the Café needs to be financially stable first.

“Our whole goal is that we really want clubs and affinity groups to be able to use the Café at certain times,” Jones said. “But we really have to focus on our efforts right now, in this new year, on building the Café higher than what it had been.”

For the foreseeable future, the current menu will be the standard. But as the year progresses, the Leadership team hopes to expand it with seasonal additions, signature drinks, and possibly food items.

“Our students have a wide range of tastes and interests, and so [the question is of] how many of those we can achieve and still make it as though the quality can be good,” Mr. Peoples said.

Although Jones said they have “big plans” for the future, they’re happy with what they’ve achieved so far and hope that the Red and Blue Brew Café will only continue to grow as a community staple through the years.

“I’m just really excited for our students to continue to coalesce around this vision,” Mr. Peoples said. “Not just our leadership students who are running the Café, but our community as a whole.”