Bitty and Beau’s Coffee: a Guest Blog

Guest blog post from my friend Joanne’s friend, Mary Ann Miller:

I just visited my sixth Bitty and Beau’s! Joanne and I were coming back from a fabulous week at a watercolor workshop in the North Carolina mountains, and I had to stop in Columbia for this.

Bitty and Beau’s is in their words “a human rights movement disguised as a coffee shop.” It was the brainchild of Amy and Ben Wright of Wilmington, NC, who have two children who were born with Down syndrome, Bitty and Beau. They decided to create a place where people with disabilities are valued & given opportunity for meaningful work and opened the first Bitty and Beau’s coffee shop in 2016 in Wilmington. It employed 19 individuals with disabilities. Now, March of 2025 it has grown to 18 shops across 11 states with 400+ employees.

When B&B first opened in Jacksonville, Florida in 2022, I was drawn to it because I had had a precious daughter with Down syndrome. She worked at McDonald’s for many years, and she would have loved working in this wonderful coffee shop. A small journal was on the counter among other B&B merchandise for sale, and as I am an artist and a bookbinder, I bought one with the goal of sketching each Bitty and Beau’s across the country. I replaced the lined paper with plain paper, bought a sticker for the first page and began. I Have sketched all the shops on the southeast coast – Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina- and hope to get to Alabama and Tennessee before long.

If you are anywhere near a Bitty and Beau’s do visit, have a cuppa and enjoy the place. If not, look for them on the internet or while traveling, and maybe one will open in your town soon. It’s a worthy endeavor.

Photos from my sketchbook enclosed.

–Mary Ann Miller