Beloved Community Cafe

Beloved Community Cafe is the dream of Good Samaritan Church and Recovery Epicenter Foundation. Both of us individually had a vision: a warm, welcoming spot where people could come together over food and build real community. Then we found each other—and the rest is history.

Now, we’re teaming up to run the cafe. Recovery Epicenter Foundation will foster a recovery community and connect people to needed services. Good Samaritan will cultivate belonging, connecting people to community and spiritual care as well as opportunities for personal growth, service, and advocacy work. The cafe will also double as Good Samaritan’s church home and host our table-based worship services on Sundays.

The partnership between us is blooming, but we see the cafe vision as bigger than just us. Already other churches and community organizations 

No, while we hope the cafe reaches those who are food and housing insecure and provides for basic needs of hunger, thirst, escape from the heat or rain, and more, we have a much bigger vision for the cafe and hope it reaches a much wider group of people. Hunger for community cuts across divisions of race, age, gender, gender identity, socio-economic status, disability, sexual orientation and more. Our hope is that a recent widow, a middle-aged transplant, a queer teenager, or a recovering addict might find just as much of what they hunger for here.

In truth we aren’t really seeking to be a charity at all. We want to be the type of community where the line between guest and host is permeable: where guests can easily become hosts and hosts become guests and all can find that for which they hunger.

We are opening Beloved Community Cafe in a storefront at 1940 Central Avenue in the Grand Central District of St. Petersburg, Florida. We are excited to be in the heart of the city and have a Central Trolley stop right out front!

Learn more about meal-based worship.