Hill’s entrepreneurship class helps build a zero-waste cafe in Pottstown

By EMERSON LEGER ’25

For the past month, Hill’s entrepreneurship class has been hard at work with a project to give back to the Pottstown community and the environment. With the help of Hobart’s Run Executive Director Twila Fisher and Hoda Ehsan, Director of Quadrivium Engineering and Design, students will learn, research, and then build a zero-waste book cafe in Pottstown.

Fisher and Ehsan initiated the program in hopes to open a student-directed cafe and a downtown center for experiential learning. With the help of the Communication Director Cathy Skitko, they combined ideas, and Ehsan drew up a proposal and Fisher found a building to rent on High Street.

After securing a lease for the building, which will last between December 2022 to June 2023, the next step was to meet with the Borough of Pottstown to get a zoning permit.

“We still need to get an approved sign permit and a final commercial inspection from the Borough before the cafe can be open to the public,” Fisher stated in an email.

Students involved in community service and the Entrepreneurship class were then notified about the idea. “We were notified of this project in late November before H-term, but we really got to work on it this past week,”

McKay Allain ’23 mentioned.

With the goal of developing a zero-waste cafe, they plan to use repurposed materials. In an email, Ehsan mentioned, “We have gotten some furniture from the Hill storage, and Hill’s ITS was very generous by providing us with many electronic devices that we need.”

Fisher added that additional resources for the cafe will come from “general donations, project-specific donor funds, and volunteer labor.”

Allain is excited to contribute to the zero waste book cafe.

“This not only benefits our class and what we have learned thus far, but we have an opportunity to give back to Pottstown and the environment,” she said.

What Fisher would like the students to take away from this project is to implement zero waste principles, developed a social impact that benefits Pottstown, and learn how to practice sustainable development in social enterprise. These goals align with what the students learned in the beginning of the year. “We learned about budgeting and crucial things to start a successful business,” Allain explained.

This idea started as a dream and turned into a reality. Ehsan stated in an email, “I have always had a passion to take my engineering knowledge to communities outside the education organizations. After being at the Hill School for more than a year, I decided to turn this idea into a reality and make it happen.”

The grand opening of the cafe will be on February 16 and 17, with the location being on 249 E. High Street in downtown Pottstown. Allain commented that she and her classmates are excited to see the outcome of all the hard work they put in. “It is fun to learn how to start a business and to successfully go through with all of it,” she shared.

The entrepreneurship class voted on the official name “Book n’ Brew.” Fisher explained however, that they will use zero-waste book cafe as a definition of what they are offering to the Pottstown community.