CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Open six days a week for breakfast and lunch from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., the new Community Matters Café broke ground Monday with sledgehammers and a press conference.
The restaurant will feature a coffee shop for quick stops and private areas for business meetings.
Located on First Street in uptown and close to the Bank of America Stadium, restaurant owners say the opening in the Fall can't come soon enough.
"Community Matters Café will be a real-world laboratory," said Tony Marciano, CEO of the Charlotte Rescue Mission. "And when they mess up, they won't get fired but learn how to do it better the next time. So that when they graduate from the Rescue Mission, they will be very marketable."
The new café will be unique to Charlotte with almost all of the staff made up of people in recovery from the grip of addictions.
Marciano's vision has $1.6 million in funding from Community Matters, Forest Hill Church, Elevation Church and the Mecklenburg County ABC Board. The goal is to provide life skills for graduates of the Charlotte Rescue Mission's residential substance abuse recovery program while providing the Queen City with a new spot for coffee, and meetings.
CRM says 20 students at a time will work inside the Café with supervision.
To learn about the work that the Charlotte Rescue Mission does in the Queen City, you can click here for more information.