Cafe has whole lot of faith

Faith Holmes was around 6 years old when her mother took her to a black church for a teachable moment. After services, the children were invited to attend Sunday school, but Holmes resisted. As the only white child, she recalls telling her mother she felt different. Her mother replied, “Good. Now you know what it feels like.”

Then she told her young daughter to remember that feeling whenever there was an opportunity to be kind to someone who might feel like an outcast.

It is in that spirit that Holmes dedicated her 20s to race relations work in Los Angeles, forming a nonprofit with a Grammy Award-winning music producer and acting as personal assistant to a renowned African American author. And it is how she now runs her community cafe in a gentrified Washington neighborhood near the famous U Street Corridor, once a major hub for African American music and business.

On a freezing predawn morning, the sidewalk scattered with salt in anticipation of snow, Holmes, now 44, unlocked the door of her small business, Love ‘n Faith Cafe. Nestled between a high-priced gym, a boutique grocery store and underneath apartments where a one bedroom rents for around $3,000 a month, the cafe is meant to be a place where everyone, regardless of race or class, is welcome.

Inside, a glass case is filled with Holmes’ muffins and scones, and there is a liquid nitrogen ice cream machine. It’s a coffee shop, a bakery, an ice cream shop, a smoothie bar, a sandwich place — it’s a bit unfocused, but it’s trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone, which is fitting.

Holmes welcomes local activists to hold community meetings in the cafe. On any given afternoon, neighborhood schoolchildren careen through the door, and Holmes’ staff knows that each, if they say please and thank you, can have a free ice cream sample.

“Sometimes it’s disruptive to the customers, but my whole feeling is I want (the kids) to feel welcome,” she said in an interview.

The current political climate and the racial discord it has engendered makes Holmes feel like a space like hers is more vital than ever. She plans to continue these dialogues on Monday nights throughout 2017.

“We can talk about the dirt, the hardship, but we have to come together with the thought of understanding and upliftment,” she said. “What can we do to make it better? What are we doing?”