If you let your love show, it can be fun, you know If you let your heart go, anything's
possible.
Our original mission was to save the world and it's still our mission and we are actually
accomplishing that goal.
We're saving the world by starting in our own backyard, in our own community and we're
just being the change that we wish to see in the world by having an eco business, by
promoting community, by supporting the arts and the culture in that community and by providing
people with delicious, nutritious food that is, you know, wonderful to eat and people
can just come together around the table and enjoy themselves.
Really my palette actually led me to the environmental movement because when I started
tasting organic food I was like this stuff tastes way better, what's going on here?
For us it's a sense of okay well what makes us feel empowered, how can we be more self-reliant,
how can we do things that have meaning for us.
There's a lot that can be done by reducing your impact first.
So we chose a model of vegetarian, so it's a model of exclusion, we were excluding some
meat products and that is much more sustainable for our environment.
We also decided on a model that was salads and wraps versus having big ovens that heat
up a lot of different foods because we wanted to reduce our energy consumption.
So we did a lot of thought about what we shouldn't do and what were the biggest things that were
problems for the environment.
I mean we recycled a lot of products, we used a lot of materials that had been used before,
we tried to minimize on purchasing new materials each and everywhere we could, you know, just
from the idea like, you know, all the wood frames are wood that used to have some other
place in the original house that we retrofitted.
The door sign actually, our big sign out front is actually a door that was in here.
Yeah, we tried to, I mean we tried to not throw out and tried to not purchase, so you
talk about a constant, you know, cycle of recycling, I mean some of the other things
that we do is, you know, we have composting system, we compost as much organic waste as
we can.
We've got a really awesome worm composting bin, it's almost the size of a dumpster and
it's got like thousands and thousands of worms in it.
More important than all of that is just also when we're looking at our supplying, we really
try to look closely at where we're getting our supplies in order to reduce our environmental
impact but we try to do that as much as possible to reduce on the fossil fuels and to also
support our local economy and keep money circulating in our economy and to help keep
crop acreage alive and well in Florida.
My advice would be just to localize everything, localize your thought process, localize your
spending habits, you know, even try and plant a tomato garden or a cucumber garden, that's
how we started it.
We started with tomatoes and cucumbers and that whole experience was just fantastic and
that just started a waterfall of discovery.
Society is at a very deep level about what is the best for people, the planet, the critters
that are on it and all of the things that make a community.
We have a lot of artists on staff, we attract a lot of artists, we attract a lot of free
thinkers and that creates, you know, that's a little incubator for, you know, just a lot
of cool crazy ideas that pop out of this place, you know, on a daily basis.
It's all about empowering and letting people know that their thoughts and feelings are
real and true and how do we handle those in the real world and how do we communicate
with each other and just really letting people feel that power within themselves.
So I think that that's really what helps in the creative process here.
We have so many events that reach out to the community, but we have these big festivals
in essence where we have live music all day, all of these different vendor booths come
out, there's all different kinds of kids activities and a lot of times they'll end in a drum circle.
Every month we showcase three different artists in the three distinct rooms of the cafe and
we have an art opening around that.
Another story that's worth mentioning is the whole aspect of community involvement and
the ongoing maintenance of this place and support of this place, but also in the initial
stages of creating this place that we call Daniline.
But one thing Julie taught me well is, you know, a movement like this, an organization
like this cannot be created by individuals, it has to be created by a community-wide support.
The results of that community involvement went far and wide beyond what I initially
could imagine.
Not only did we get some of the physical labor done, but we also created a fan base, a loyalty
base that when we opened our doors, each and every one of those volunteers probably talked
to about 10 to 20 of their friends and I think they all came, you know, in the first few
months of the cafe and then just kept building and, you know, we're here three and a half
years later with our doors still open in a tough economy and that's, you know, I think
that's a mark of success.
If anything, I just forgot what I was going to say.
