Covenant House – New York City  

In the 1990s, when she was a young single mother experiencing housing instability, Tambra found support, job training and a sense of safety from the mother-and-child program at Covenant House New York. “They said, ‘hold your head up, it’s going to be alright,’” remembers Tambra, who joined Starbucks as a barista in 2005. “It was bigger than a roof over my head. I always think of them, to this day.”  

---

Almost 300 partners in New York City, including Tambra, nominated Covenant House for a Neighborhood Grant. Covenant House works to end youth homelessness, with chapters across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Across North America, since 2019, 30 Neighborhood Grants totaling $64,000 have been awarded to 10 different Covenant House locations. 

There are numerous touch points between the organizations, from Adam, Starbucks regional vice president in New York, who slept outside at Times Square during the annual Sleep Out event to raise awareness, to Abegail, a store manager, who resonates so much the Covenant House mission, she brings Starbucks food and drinks donations to its monthly resident council meetings. 

Abegail immigrated from Guyana, started working at Starbucks as a 17-year-old to help her family pay the bills and nine years later, became a store manager in Manhattan. 

Starbucks also recently worked with Covenant House New York’s CovWorks workforce development program to host a job fair and hire five young people. 

Renata Alexis, senior vice president of residential services at Covenant House New York, says, “Covenant House’s mission is basically to serve the suffering children of the streets, with unconditional love and respect. And we take that very, very seriously. We do good work, but it wouldn’t work if we didn’t have a village, and Starbucks represents part of that village that’s helping us to act.”