Glitter Bean’s workers turn to crowdfunding to save queer-centric co-op cafe

It’s the end of a hot and sweltering day, and Alex Marchand and Minnow Holtz-Carriere are closing up shop. There are counters to wipe, glasses to clean and stubborn appliances to fix. All in a day’s work at Glitter Bean Café, the queer-owned worker’s co-op that has served coffee at 5896 Spring Garden Road since 2018. In spite of the heat, it’s work both Marchand and Holtz-Carriere love.

“There’s a lot of emphasis in queer communities on found family—this is like a found home,” Marchand tells The Coast.

There are queer knitting nights. Free film screenings. Drag shows. Clothing swaps. (The second-hand consignment store The Has Bin sublets the space upstairs.) There are community forums. A pay-it-forward system for customers who can’t afford food or a coffee. A free community fridge. But all of that, Marchand and Holtz-Carriere say, is in jeopardy: The cafe’s combined rent and property tax expenses have gone up to $10,000 a month. Two of its fridges are broken. Ditto for an ice machine. Most staff have been working “hours of free labour,” Marchand says, in order to keep the business afloat—and that only begins to cover the “major financial losses” the cafe incurred from two years of pandemic-driven restrictions on businesses. Late last week, the group launched a GoFundMe in hopes of garnering support from Haligonians in order to stay alive.

“Nobody’s an investor here; there’s nobody with deep pockets,” Marchand says. “It’s just a bunch of people who found themselves in this… pure passion project. People who have kept this place alive because they love it—not because any of us [are] financially benefiting at all.”

The cafe’s workers see Glitter Bean as a so-called “third space”: A place where Haligonians can find community, host events and meet friends without requiring vast sums of money. A reprieve from late capitalism, if you will. And now, as they reckon with the harsh realities of a system they’d like to change—“How do you continue to offer your services in an accessible way, while also being able to pay yourself enough money to continue to exist?” Holtz-Carriere asks—they’re hoping they’ve fostered enough community to survive.

How it started

It has been a long road for the Glitter Bean. Formerly the Smiling Goat espresso bar, the cafe was founded by a group of workers who set out to open an employee-run queer cafe—the only one of its kind in Halifax, then or now. Those same workers had been in the midst of a yearslong dispute with their former boss at Smiling Goat over alleged unfair labour practices. Staff at Smiling Goat’s six Halifax locations claimed their paycheques were bouncing. Some alleged their former employer hadn’t filed taxes properly, leading to sudden and unexpected debts in the thousands of dollars owed to the Canada Revenue Agency. They also claimed their employer failed to provide the health benefits they were due through their collective agreement.

“People who are in a position to be able to fight for their rights—whether they know how to do so or have the support to do so—making that public so other people know they can do it too is really important,” Glitter Bean co-founder Lorelei Carey told The Coast in 2019.

(Smiling Goat’s former owner, Kit Singh, told The Coast his ex-employees’ claims were “questionable,” and has sought hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged lost revenue and damages. He has not been awarded any money in court, to The Coast’s knowledge.)

The dispute ended with Smiling Goat’s closure on Spring Garden Road in April 2018. But it also opened a door: What if the workers took over the lease and opened their own cafe?

“It was a really fast mental shift,” Carey told The Coast, “but finally we felt a little light at the end of the tunnel. We had this opportunity to take this space we’d all been working in and make it our own… To finally be able to explore what we want this space to mean was really exciting.”

A financial blow

The earliest years of Glitter Bean were a success: Not only did it fill a niche within Halifax’s queer community, but its proximity to Dalhousie University offered a steady supply of students looking for large amounts of caffeine. Haligonians took notice. The Coast’s readers voted the cafe the silver winner for Best New Business in the 2018 Best of Halifax Awards. A year later, readers voted it silver for Best Cafe.

The difficulties arrived in earnest, Marchand and Holtz-Carriere tell The Coast, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit—“same story with tons of other small businesses,” Holtz-Carriere says. On March 22, 2020, Nova Scotia’s government declared a state of emergency. Then-premier Stephen McNeil told Nova Scotians to “stay the blazes home.” The results were devastating for the province’s cafes, bars and restaurants: In the span of a month, according to a Restaurants Canada survey at the time, the province lost nearly 25,000 food-service jobs.

Glitter Bean held on, but not without taking on what its worker-owners describe as “major financial losses.”

“Just not making money for a long time, but still having lots of bills to pay,” Holtz-Carriere explains. “And so we find ourselves here today with this legacy that we would like to carry on, right? Of workers’ struggle and solidarity, and a queer space, and a co-op business. But [we’re] in this predicament.”

“We find ourselves here today with this legacy that we would like to carry on, right? Of workers’ struggle and solidarity, and a queer space, and a co-op business. But [we’re] in kind of this predicament.”

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Property taxes have gone up, Glitter Bean’s workers say. As tenants under a “net lease,” they’re on the hook for them, despite not owning the building. Those taxes went up “drastically” in 2023, they say. (The Spring Garden Road cafe currently has a taxable assessed commercial value of $801,000, per Nova Scotia’s land records. That’s up roughly 14% from a year before.)

“Previously, we would usually be owed a couple hundred bucks at the end of the year,” Holtz-Carriere says. “This year, we owed a couple thousand.”

That has made the ordinary business challenges even more difficult: There’s no money to repair the two commercial fridges that stopped working, nor tackle what Marchand describes as “some leaks around the place that need fixing.” The group would like to build up an emergency reserve fund. In better circumstances, they’d love to repaint the cafe and stock up on things like books for its community library, or better equipment for open mic nights.

“We want to make sure that we have a labour budget to be able to pay for all the work going into the place,” Marchand says. “We really want to make it a cozy community hub again.”

There’s also the matter of legacy: Halifax, despite boasting the second-highest per capita population of trans and non-binary people in all of Canada’s cities, is in rather short supply of 2SLGBTQ+ spaces. For that reason alone, keeping Glitter Bean alive matters, Marchand says.

“We have all these folks here, and we don’t have a space for them.”

How it’s going

Glitter Bean’s workers have set three staggered fundraising goals of $25,000, $35,000 and $55,000. The first goal, they say, would allow them to replace their fridges and ice machine, fix a leaky ceiling, cover $6,000 in projected losses from July to September and create a “modest” $4,000 labour budget for things like strategic planning. The mid-term goal would accomplish the former, and also create a reserve fund in the case of emergencies. The ultimate goal would allow them to pay down some of their remaining debts and give the cafe a facelift.

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Martin Bauman / The Coast

The Glitter Bean Café’s owners are hoping to raise enough money to give the building a facelift.

They know the money is a big ask, and that there will be those who wonder why a business is… well, getting into the business of asking for money. They also think it’s worth fighting for—not just for their own livelihoods, but for what the cafe represents in an increasingly unaffordable city.

“It’s less about business plan, free-market stuff and more about just being a community,” Marchand says. “Like, there are people who genuinely do not have anything who come here, because it’s the only place they can go for what they need: Free food, free drinks, a space with wi-fi and heat and power, where we don’t kick people out for not buying anything.”

Can a place survive on its principles? They’re hoping so.

As of Wednesday, July 19, Glitter Bean’s workers have raised more than $16,200 toward their goal. TikTok star and actor Alicia Mccarvell, The Bus Stop Theatre Co-op and the King’s Co-op Bookstore have all contributed. Donations continue to come in by the hour.

“Before ever turning to public fundraising, we searched for so many grants—like there’s got to be options out there, but they are hard to [access],” Holtz-Carriere says. “There’s not really a lifeline or a safety net out there for small businesses.”

—With files from Allison Saunders, Jessica Durling, Rebecca Dingwell and Jacob Boon.