A Latte Love: Ethan & the Bean

Like many parents, Pamela Donovan was worried when her then 21-year-old son, Ethan, was about to graduate. But her concerns for Ethan were different from those of many of other parents. 

“My son is very severely on the spectrum, and along with that has a rare genetic disorder,” Donovan says. “When he was finishing school, we got to this juncture where I was questioning: What is my child going to do now? What is his life going to look like?”

She’d been told that Ethan, who is nonverbal, couldn’t be in the workforce. “I didn’t think I wanted him in a day program, though,” she says. “He’s a very calm, very chill, person and I worried he wouldn’t engage enough.”

She wanted her son to have an involved, meaningful life. She wanted him to spend his days somewhere he felt safe, and to fill his time with purpose. But she couldn’t find a place that met those needs. “Work is where most people spend most of their day,” she says. “When I asked myself, ‘Who is going to give my child an opportunity to work?’ the answer was no one.”

OPPORTUNITY AWAITS

In 2019, Donovan founded Ethan & the Bean, a coffee shop and café, to create meaningful employment opportunities for people with autism and intellectual disabilities. 

It started small, with an eight-week pilot program in the basement of a church turned therapy center. “They had a big multipurpose room and a big kitchen we could use,” Donovan says. “We even had built-in customers. There was a summer camp being held upstairs, and after drop-off, the parents would come down and sit and have a cup of coffee with us.” The success of the pilot program quickly led to a brick-and-mortar location in Little Falls. A Morristown location opened in November 2023.

The first 12 students, including Ethan, were taught job readiness and pre-vocational skills in this mock-up coffee shop environment. “There are multiple tasks that need to be done in a coffee shop. You have to make the coffee, serve the customer, package online orders,” she says. 

Both Ethan & the Bean’s Corner Coffee University, a pre-vocational program, and its work-based learning program collaborate closely with experts and local private schools that focus on educating neurodiverse students. Both locations also have on-staff special needs educators who oversee training and the general needs of the neurodivergent staff members and their neurotypical work partners. 

“We want this to be an incredibly supportive and productive work environment,” Donovan says. “Each day when you come in, you are assigned a neurotypical buddy who is there to help you achieve your goals. You might be learning to be a barista or spending the afternoon taking inventory. We want you to learn and be successful at all these skills because they are transferable to other businesses. It’s work-based learning and job readiness because you could also do these things in a pizzeria, for instance.”

EXPANDING SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

Soon after the Little Falls location opened, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “We had to shut down for a few months, but we still had all these individuals who needed to be kept busy,” Donovan says. The solution? Teach them to bake. “We now make about 50 percent of our baked goods in house,” she says. These include lemon blueberry bread—one of Donovan’s favorites—and chocolate chip and matcha cookies. 

In 2023, the Morristown location opened, thanks to a “very amazing opportunity” from Valley National Bank, which was moving its headquarters to town. “They called out of the blue to say they wanted Ethan & the Bean to be their community café,” she says. “They built out the entire space for us to create a café with teaching and training opportunities.” 

Today, Ethan & the Bean employs more than 25 autistic and intellectually disabled individuals across its two locations, and there’s an extensive waiting list. “It’s hard to tell people we can’t help them right now,” Donovan says.

To that end, the Little Falls café is moving to a larger location. The new, larger space will allow Corner Coffee University, which is still operating out of its original basement location, to move under the same roof as the café. In Morristown, where Ethan & the Bean already has a large space, “we’d like to have like-minded businesses come under our umbrella. We’d love to pilot our training programs and processes with other cafés or small eateries to expand what we can offer our community,” she says. 

As for Ethan, who works two days each week at the Little Falls location of his namesake café, he “loves being in the coffee shop,” his mom says. “It keeps him quite busy. He works at our sugar bar stations. He stamps our bakery bags. He packages online orders. He’s doing real, meaningful work.”

Visit ethanandthebean.com for more information about the Morristown location (70 Speedwell Ave.) and ways to support the café’s mission, or to register for Ethan & the Bean’s 7th annual fundraising golf outing on October 1 at Galloping Hill Park and Golf Course.

Photograph by Josh Song/SNS Media