It has not been a rags-to-riches trajectory for Skyler Kelley.
True, her startup business, Brij Coffee, has been buzzing ever since its debut last year just down the street from Amazon’s gleaming HQ2. Occupying one of the kiosks at National Landing’s Water Park, the homegrown venture has cultivated a following with menu items such as salted-caramel lattes, fruit smoothies and breakfast combos. A second Brij location is set to open in the coming months in Mount Vernon Square in the District.
But Kelley’s mission isn’t simply to keep customers happily caffeinated. Her ultimate goal is to use the business to help end homelessness. She gives a portion of her earnings to nonprofits that help people who are unhoused. She has bigger plans.
As of late October, Kelley, 30, was unhoused herself. Unable to pay the back rent on the D.C. apartment she’d been sharing with her 8-year-old daughter, Emma, she was forced to vacate. At the time of this writing, they were staying with friends and seeking housing elsewhere in the area.
So behind that mission statement at Brij, there’s real drive.
Currently on the receiving end of the coffee shop’s philanthropy is SMYAL (formerly the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League), an organization that supports queer youth in the D.C. area, including those in need of shelter.
Kelley donates because she has known homelessness herself not once, but many times—from her on-again, off-again spells of being unhoused as a girl growing up in Atlanta, all the way up through her early days as a single mom in the D.C. region when she lived out of her car with her infant daughter in an Alexandria Walmart parking lot.
“[Housing] is just something that’s never been stable in my life. When I first opened Brij, I wasn’t paying myself,” says the entrepreneur, who raised money to start her business with outdoor wine and jazz nights hosted in a friend’s backyard in D.C.
Kelley arrived in the DMV in 2015 as a “church plant” for Atlanta’s nondenominational Grace Midtown Church. The church was opening a satellite location in the District and seeking volunteer members to help seed the new congregation there.
“It was a calling,” she says.
For a short time, things went well. She found work at the Adams Morgan coffeehouse Tryst, taking to-go orders and prepping for the barista. (She would later learn more about running a coffee shop while working at Peregrine Espresso in Union Market.)
That same year, however, Kelley was sexually assaulted and became pregnant as a result. She went home to Georgia to have the baby, returning to the DMV with her daughter in 2017. “Homelessness is rampant throughout my family,” she explains. “There was nothing for me in Georgia.”
It wasn’t until the following year that she was able to secure subsidized housing in Germantown, Maryland.
Eventually she and Emma moved into an apartment near Union Market in the District for the sake of launching Brij. (The company name, a play on the word “bridge,” signifies the startup’s connection to community members in need, and Kelley’s goal of serving that population.)
She envisioned the move into the city as a means to an end—a way to be closer to a clientele that wouldn’t think twice about shelling out $11 for a mocha and a muffin.
“Someone asked me, ‘If you had all the money in the world, would you be open?’ ” she says. “The answer is, probably not. I want to be in housing. I want to work on [that].”
That makes Brij—which sources beans from Georgetown’s Grace Street Coffee Roasters and baked goods from DMV production kitchen RavenHook Bakehouse—a pure-and-simple conduit to Kelley’s larger aspiration of helping people without shelter.
“She thinks about it every second of every day,” says Brian Brenneman, one of Brij’s eight workers. “She’s infectiously ambitious. We give back to community, we help community. We all get hired on that understanding.”
Beyond giving money to SMYAL and other nonprofits, Kelley aims to one day open her own drop-in day center where people who are unhoused can shower, access personal-hygiene supplies, have a meal and hop on the internet to hunt for jobs. It wasn’t so long ago that she relied on assistance from Friendship Place, a drop-in center, food pantry and shelter network in Northwest D.C.
For people experiencing homelessness, she says, the risks are even greater for women, children and the LGBTQ+ community. “The staff there did help me,” she says of her nights spent at shelters operated by Friendship Place. But the presence of men in those facilities was a source of unease.
Though she and Emma had a separate place to sleep, “it was uncomfortable in the mornings when I would get breakfast.” The still-unsolved Relisha Rudd case, in which an 8-year-old girl living in a D.C. shelter went missing in 2014, weighs heavily on her.
“That shelter was for everyone, not just for moms or families,” Kelley says. “If she had had [a shelter exclusively for women and children], it wouldn’t have happened.”
With Brij as a source of capital, she hopes to eventually own a few of her own Section 8 (government subsidized) housing units.
That’s not the only long-term goal. Making her face known—including at the order window of her coffee kiosk—will help when it comes time to activate her plan to run for D.C. Council.
Working on policy, Kelley says, is the only way to effect change on a scale that matches the magnitude of the problem.
“No one—I don’t care if you make $100,000 a year—no one should pay $3,000 to $4,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment,” she says. “This is a necessity. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? This is at the bottom.”
Susan Anspach is a writer, preschool teacher and mom of three in Vienna, Virginia.