The CREDO

CREDO Coffee is a social enterprise benefit corporation committed to inspiring the pursuit of meaning, impact and community- through our Coffee and Community Initiatives.

We are instigated by our CREDO that says…

Life is worth living. I refuse to merely exist. I pursue a life of meaning and purpose, fulfillment and joy. The world is not yet as it ought to be. Neither is my city. Neither am I. Yet, I reject apathy and despair. I engage the world, my city, and myself to make an impact for good. I am not alone. I press through narcissism, isolation and self-sufficiency striving to live in authentic community.

We move toward this CREDO with successive small choices, like our cups of coffee. We’re convinced that buying a cup of coffee is a big deal. Our coffee is carried down mountains, shipped across oceans and carefully roasted just for you. Each cup of CREDO coffee not only tastes great, but it has a positive impact on the people who touch it. We build relationships with our growers and suppliers to avoid supporting exploitation of people or environment; and we pay growers as directly as possible to get as much money in their hands as we can. Your coffee purchase always supports a system; our system is making an impact for good.

We've learned that if you pursue a life of meaning, impact, and community and start with steps so small they seem silly, you may not know where you'll end up—but it will certainly be good. We'd definitely encourage you to launch your own pursuit of meaning, impact and community (just make sure to bring good coffee).

From 2010, with love

Downtown CREDO was founded in the spring of 2010 and opened the doors to its first coffee shop in College Park in early 2011. From then until 2024, we operated four cafés across Orlando, each engaging our city in ways unique to its community.

In College Park we organized trash clean-ups and get-fit weeks, permaculture workshops, songwriters stages, poetry readings, float building competitions, and parades.

From our Health Village location on the Advent Health campus, we ran social enterprise pitch competitions and provided hospital staff free coffee during the pandemic and at the Exchange downtown, we hosted entrepreneur and tech industry meetups.

We shared our North Quarter location with a number of different partners through the years: it started as a grocery and ice cream shoppe, then a BBQ joint, a taco stand, and finally a bookstore before we opened our own vegan kitchen in 2023. We were proud to host Diverse Word (Orlando's longest continuously running open-mic) and the Cinnabar Film Series, showcase local artists in curated exhibits, and host a number of book releases for local and national authors. We also worked closely with the Revolutionary Education and Action League (REAL), the Florida Palestine Network, Central Florida Mutual Aid, and the Orlando DSA to bring opportunities for educational development and impactful engagement with our city.

During our last year in the North Quarter we partnered with REAL to support the operations of the People's Free Kitchen (PFK), a program designed to meet immediate needs of people experiencing homelessness in the Parramore neighborhood of Orlando. In addition to their (continued) work to organize and advocate for the rights of our homeless neighbors who's existence is continuously increasingly criminalized by local and state law, PFK operated out of our kitchen and distributed 80-100 fresh, hot, nutritious meals on a weekly basis, serving over 4,700 meals by the time we closed our shop.

Through the years, we've created countless opportunities for folks to become friends and move toward lives of meaning impact and community, all while enjoying direct-trade coffee.

After moving away from retail locations in late 2024, CREDO coffee is available online and now focuses on roasting for select wholesale partners.

Friends, old and new

As early as 2011 our challenging task of network cultivation was organized into three divisions: Coffee, Rally, and Conduit. Each of these divisions created opportunities for folks to not only be introduced to a life animated by the CREDO, but to step into the growing web of people who've committed to it.

CREDO Conduit has grown into a co-working space where a community of companies and individuals is committed to the notion that our work gets better when we come alongside people who are different from us. Rally has spun off into its own non-profit in partnership with the Central Florida Foundation and Rollins College with the mission of elevating Orlando into a regional hub for new social enterprises. CREDO's original neighborhood organizing efforts also spun off into its own non-profit called Orlando Together with the mission of fortifying cities and organizations by undermining racial divisions.

Now, though our days of hosting organizations and events at our cafes are gone, we still partner with local organizations to help them push their work forward in our mutually beneficial Impact Makers program that supports coffee producers and our community partners simultaneously. Our coffees support initiatives that provide services for our local LGBTQ+ community, healthcare funds for individuals in need, education initiatives, and mutual aid programs that provide people experiencing homelessness with free food, clothing, harm reduction and hygiene materials. Together, we're taking what steps we can to build the future we want to live in, today.

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