Front Porch, situated on the outskirts of Cal Poly campus, is a free coffee shop with a commitment to community at its core. For many, it is somewhere to catch up with friends, enjoy a meal, wind down between classes or simply fuel up with a mid-day cup of coffee.
Since its inception in 2004, Front Porch has seen significant growth in the number of students that come through their doors. This summer, to accommodate this growth as well as freshen up the space, Front Porch underwent a renovation.
Joel Drenckpohl, who has been the executive director of Front Porch since 2013, says the change was largely motivated by the need for a refresh — which Front Porch had not undergone for 10 years.
Drenckpohl’s vision for the Front Porch renovation was prompted by a video he saw on social media of a coffee shop. Initial ideas for the refresh centered around the color green, which Drenkpohl said he envisioned being part of the space since the idea phase of the new project.
Teaming up with Dominique Floyd, associate director of Front Porch, the pair’s collective excitement over the project snowballed into visions of what the new space could look like. With the plan in motion, Front Porch interns led a campaign to help raise money to offset the cost of the renovation. The team raised around $6,000 for the renovation in spring of this year.
Drenckpohl recalled loving the feeling he would get when he changed up his room as a child or when the teacher would switch around the desk configurations in school, and he wanted to bring this same feeling into the Front Porch refresh.
“That’s very much how I feel when I get to redo this space or even make little changes,” he said. “And so this summer was very energizing in that sense of getting to do that, but exhausting as well. Just a lot of painting, putting together furniture, getting rid of stuff that we needed to get out of the space and then bringing new stuff in.”
Floyd and Drenckpohl spent the summer painting, decorating and renovating the space. The walls downstairs, which were originally blue, received a coat of green paint and a new gallery wall prominently featuring a tapestry with the phrase “you belong here.”
Additionally, the upstairs area of Front Porch was reconfigured to add more seating and match the collaborative energy of the downstairs area.
“I can’t tell you how many times over the past 10 years, I hear people at the base of the stairs, two people, obviously wanted to have a conversation say, “Oh, we can’t go up there, you have to be quiet up there,” Drenckpohl said.
Rather than a strictly quiet study space, Drenckpohl wanted the upstairs of Front Porch to feel as inviting and conducive to connection as the downstairs area. They added built-in benches, cafe tables and replaced the carpet with new vinyl flooring.
“It feels like a coffee shop upstairs now,” Drenckpohl said. “We had a lot of fun with the bookshelf too. We got rid of the majority of the books, kept some that were just for aesthetics and then filled it with a bunch of fun little things to spark people’s imagination and things to look at.”
Samhita Vallamreddy is an architecture senior who has been volunteering at Front Porch since her second year. Though she only volunteers for an hour each week, Vallamreddy says the experience is highly rewarding.
“I’m fulfilling my barista dreams and also I get to talk to so many people,” she said.
With the library closed, Vallamreddy says Front Porch saw a huge influx of people looking to find somewhere to study. With the new renovations, she thinks that Front Porch will be able to better accommodate the amount of people they serve.
“In architecture school we call spaces like these third spaces,” Vallamreddy said. “So it’s not home or work or school, it’s a space in between… to have a space like that on a college campus is quite incredible.”
The beginnings
While Front Porch as an organization has been around since 2004, their history goes back to the 50s, according to Drenckpohl.
Historically, Front Porch is a Christian-based organization. In the 1950s the Presbyterian church purchased the property where Front Porch now sits. Before the coffee shop, there was a home with fields behind it where a Presbyterian minister ran a college ministry from his living room. While Front Porch has always been community based, its community at this time mostly consisted of Christians or those who were interested in the faith.
In 2004, the team behind Front Porch at the time decided to build the space where the coffee shop now stands. The story behind the name, which was coined in 2004 according to Drenckpohl, centered around the idea that the front porch is historically the gathering place for Americans to congregate and have conversations with their community.
The building was finished around 2011, according to Drenckpohl. Before he joined the team at Front Porch, he said that the organization was largely for those who identified as Christian. Coffee and free meals were still part of their outreach, but it was on a much smaller scale.
“I remember coming here for my interview and meeting with this group of students that hung out here,” Drenckpohl said. “And what I noticed was that they had this great big building… I sat in that main room and watched as thousands of students would walk to class and none of them even glanced at the building,”
When Drenckpohl joined the team at Front Porch, he pitched to the board transforming Front Porch into a space where all students could come and be part of the community and utilize the building, regardless of their faith background or identity.
“Let’s just provide a community that loves people really well. And that’s always been my heart that’s always been what I want to be in this world and try to emulate,” Drenckpohl said.
Over the next academic year Front Porch saw major changes. Their usual Wednesday night church service that followed the communal meal was moved to Saturdays. Drenckpohl saw the value in the ministry but wanted Wednesdays to be a place where all students could come and feel comfortable to share a meal.
“So we saw that there was still value in that for the people who valued that, but we wanted Wednesdays to just be essentially a meal,” Drenckpohl said. “Let’s just have a meal together and recognize the value in that, and that it’s an incredibly beautiful thing to share a meal together. And that there doesn’t need to be anything else for that to be valuable.”
Within a year, Wednesday meals grew from around 50 students to 150 students, according to Drenckpohl. Now, Front Porch staff regularly find themselves serving upwards of 350 people on a given Wednesday evening. During regular hours, Front Porch sees roughly 1,000 different students come through their doors weekly.
The model behind free meals and free coffee is simple. According to Drenckpohl, giving something away in a society that constantly expects something in return can be powerful. Showing students love and care in an environment that can feel so overwhelming sometimes is central to the mission of Front Porch.
Front Porch’s vision statement, “Every person and every moment matters,” are not just words, they are the guiding principles that run the organization.
“It’s just this belief that every person who walks into this space, that their story matters, that we want to hear their story, that they have something significant to contribute to this community,” Drenckpohl said. “My hope is that in this little corner that Front Porch exists in the world, that we can let as many people we know that we get the opportunity to interact with that they are incredibly valuable as a human being.”
This last spring, Drenckpohl said around 450 students signed an interest form to be volunteers for Front Porch, a record for the organization. Usually, there are about 300 student volunteers in any given quarter, three to four students in each hour time slot.
Volunteers work behind the counter serving coffee from a variety of mugs to students from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday, Fridays from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Front Porch is closed on Saturdays. Volunteers are also required to maintain a clean and sanitized space, wipe down tables and assist staff with opening and closing the space according to the Front Porch website.
Student volunteer Mylinda Tran, who is an architecture senior, says volunteering at Front Porch on Wednesday mornings provides her a midweek momentum boost.
“The visibility of seeing your community and getting to interact with people, it’s fulfilling,” she said.
In the time that Front Porch was closed for renovations, Drenckpohl saw just how much the space means to the students who utilize it. Front Porch reopened on Sept. 22 of this year, and students were anxious to return, whether that be for the coffee, community or something else entirely.
“I love this space,” Drenckpohl said. “But it’s fun to see students love this space… they want to be back in this space because this space makes them feel something. And I love that.”