BeanScene Magazine

Tucked away in the corner of the high traffic Westfield Fountain Gate shopping mall, a 40-minute drive south of Melbourne, the MadCap café doesn’t stand out as anything other than your typical chain coffee shop on first glance.

The staff moves about busily filling orders, making food and lining up well-prepared cappuccinos and lattes to be carried out.

Anthony Cheeseman, MadCap’s project manager, says it sometimes takes customers three or four visits to the café before they notice that behind the bustle of activity a message is written on the wall:

One in five of us will have a mental illness in our lifetime. It could be depression, anxiety or a psychosis, it could range from mild to severe. They could be your mum, brother, mate or… you. Like in any café, bar, shop or restaurant, some of the staff at MadCap have a mental illness. You probably can’t tell who they are, can you?

“Sometimes they sit here and cry,” says Anthony about seeing some people’s reaction to first reading the board. “People recount stories of their family, themselves. We’ve become a bit of a shop front for mental illness in the community.” 

MadCap café is in fact anything but your typical coffee shop. The project is run by Ermha Inc., The Eastern Regions Mental Health Association, a not-for-profit organisation that delivers support to people experiencing mental illness. Forty per cent of employees at MadCap are Ermha’s clients, people who suffer from mental illness and are looking to re-enter the work force. As a flexible workplace, MadCap offers extensive training and support for people who would otherwise struggle to find employment.

While Ermha works as a funding body for the program, MadCap is Anthony’s brainchild. As the former owner of two Michel’s Patisseries, Anthony comes from a background in running franchises. He sold them in 2005 and started looking for a new project and wasn’t satisfied with the idea of simply running a business for profit.

“I wanted to build something that would help the disadvantaged,” he says. This desire came from his experience of seeing his sister grow up. She had suffered brain damage at the age of six from a complication in having her appendix removed. While she went on to marry, she never worked. From this experience, Anthony recalls how much working would have meant to her, to help give extra meaning to her life.

“It was always in the back of my mind. How do I create something that would give my sister a job?”

With his experience in the franchise world, he knew that it wasn’t enough to have the will to do something, but that as with any ambitious project he needed money. He came up with the idea of a socially inclusive workplace and presented it at a not-for-profit function. Fortunately for Anthony, someone put him in contact with Ermha who were also working on the concept of social inclusion initiatives for their clients. With the support of the Ermha CEO and board, Anthony was appointed Project Manager, which gave him the support he needed to pursue his dream.
In addition to applying his franchise expertise, Anthony soon found himself an expert at applying for grants. From never having written grants in his life, he started sending off dozens of applications. Fortunately a few of them came back successful, which saw money come in from the Jack Brockhoff Foundation, Tattersalls, and then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd’s Jobs Fund.

With the funding in place, the next step was finding a location for the café. In this regard, the idea of the MadCap was met with some initial scepticism from shopping centre landlords worried about bringing in a group of people suffering from mental illness to operate a business.

“This was a little tricky at the beginning. They seemed to imagine all these crazy people running around.” Anthony explains. “I said to them, ‘do you know someone with anxiety or depression? How do they look?’. Most people know someone, and once they could relate to their own experience they were on our side.”

With a location secured, the next phase was ensuring the staff were properly trained for the workplace. For this Anthony put together a training program that covered not only the basics of conduct in the workplace, but of course, expert coffee skills.

Anthony approached VicUrban, the Victorian Government’s urban development agency, and asked for a location for a barista training school. The group was revitalising Dandenong at the time and Anthony knew they had a lot of buildings. They ended up giving him a 100 square metre space, for the very affordable price of $10 a year.

“I actually wrote them a check for $11 to cover off GST,” Anthony laughs. In that space they have four commercial coffee machines and run four-day barista certified training courses with the help of GoodTaste Training and Education. They also offer ‘come and try’ open days on Friday, where anyone, including Ermha clients and the public, can play around with the machines and get some introductory training.

The days can serve as a vital point of departure for the clients, says Anthony, as some of them haven’t left their houses for 20 years.

“This is really the start of their journey,” he notes. He brings up one client, John Spencer, as an example. Prior to getting involved with Ermha and MadCap, John hadn’t worked for 24 years. He weighed 150 kilograms, a result of his addictions to alcohol and smoking and was sleeping up to 20 hours a day. He now weighs 40 kilograms lighter, and is working through his mental illnesses.

“I’m like a completely different person now,” he told the Berwick Leader. “I’m really happy and I have heaps of friends and I’m fit and healthy.”

A key to having a flexible workplace for people with mental illnesses, explains Anthony, is understanding that episodes come and go and allowing employees to work out their problems without fear of losing their jobs. 

“I’ve come close to throwing in the towel a few times because working can get a bit much for me,” John says. “But they pick me up, dust me off and point me in the right direction again.”

Anthony explains that people most often don’t disclose their mental illness during job interviews, for the obvious reason that it may prevent them from being hired. However, as they start to work they might have a relapse, and as the employer isn’t aware of their illness they can easily lose their job, creating a vicious cycle of unemployment. With MadCap, employees have the flexibility of taking time off when they need it and extra support in the workplace to recognise when they’re in need of some help. 

Anthony’s efforts in creating a flexible workplace have so far proven successful, and we may soon be seeing a lot more stories like John’s pop up. In addition to the Westfield Fountain Gate location, Ermha also runs a café at the Dandenong Plaza Shopping Centre. The project has also attracted interest from Pathways Geelong, another service for clients with mental illnesses and when they open their own MadCap Café at the Westfield Geelong in May, this will mark the project’s growth into a social inclusion franchise. The franchise will operate by allowing other not-for-profits like Ermha to run a MadCap café to provide employment opportunities for their clients. Anthony is also now courting interest from groups in Sydney, along with other plans to expand.

A key to MadCap’s success has followed the trend of economic sustainability, in that the projects aren’t heavily reliant on ongoing funding. The locations, cleverly situated in high traffic shopping malls, are usually able to just cover their costs.

“We might be a not-for-profit, but we’re also a not-for-loss,” Anthony says. “When they’re working here, they’re having a better life, that’s taking a lot of pressure off the health system.

Disability and support payments are reduced as well. In this sense, even if the café loses a bit of money, it’s still minimal compared to what’s being saved on the other end.”

The benefits to the individuals involved in the program are something, however, that Anthony can’t measure in financial terms. Not only for themselves, but with every person they help Anthony says there are probably 20 or 30 people, family, friends, whose lives are improved by the flow-on effect.

“It’s the community we live in,” Anthony says. “If this happened to you and me, you need to ask yourself, how would we want to be treated?”