People with Purpose: why Hamlet cafe is about so much more than the coffee

Emily, what was the original plan for Hamlet, a decade ago?

I’m originally from Melbourne, where my brother had a social enterprise, Kinfolk cafe. I worked there for about five years, in the kitchen, finished my apprenticeship and was running the kitchen when I got offered a job in Hobart. I had only been to Tassie once before, to go to MONA, but I was young and naïve and decided to move down. I was working in a fine dining restaurant and loving it, but I quickly became exposed to the issue of unemployment in Tasmania, and the increased level of disadvantage in Tassie. Working in the tourism and hospitality industry, I was also hearing of the skills shortages there. With my experience in social enterprise, I felt there was an opportunity to marry those two things, providing training and support to people who were experiencing barriers to entering the workforce, while also providing the skilled workforce that tourism and hospo needed.

I decided to open a social enterprise, which was a bit of a bold move, especially in a place where I’d only been for about a year. When we first opened, we were very much working with people who were long-term unemployed and people who had low levels of English language fluency. We were sort of working directly with two organisations, the Migrant Resource Centre and also Workskills, which was a Jobactive provider.

We got a lot of attention, because there wasn’t a lot happening in the social enterprise space in Tassie at that time. It was a new concept down here. After we’d been operating for about four months, a lady approached us about her daughter, who lived with Down syndrome. She wanted her daughter to have access to training opportunities where she wasn’t only with other people with disabilities.

The outcomes that we saw with that individual … well, you couldn’t ignore them! You know, it was a really beautiful experience, not just for her and her family, but also for us as a team, and I guess it started a lot of conversations in the community about employment and the barriers that people with disability were facing. We started working in that space.

How do people become involved with your programs?

People apply for the very structured training program that we deliver. Then once they complete the training program, we assist them to find employment. We have quite a bit of success with that: I think last year it was 65 per cent of the people who completed our training program, we were able to secure employment for.

The statistics are impressive. Your website says you’re coming up on 60,000 hours of training, 800 people through the program, and 68 per cent got a job or went into further education last year. The impact is huge.

Yes, although the fact that we’ve been doing it for 10 years now feels wild. When we opened, I guess I hoped that it would be successful, but probably didn’t, in my wildest dream, think that we would still be doing this 10 years down the road, which is nice. It’s lovely that we’ve had so much community around what we’re doing and it has been able to be so successful.

You were recognised as Tasmania’s Local Hero in the 2026 Australian of the Year Awards. How did it feel?

It was pretty weird. I mean, obviously it’s very humbling, but that whole experience of going to Canberra and meeting all the other nominees and getting that recognition was amazing.

Has the government tuned into how successful you have been in this space of inclusion and employment pathways?

Yeah, we get some support from the state government down here, which is excellent. Some of our funding comes through them. I mean, the majority of our funding is through the commercial operations of our social enterprises: we’ve got the cafe and then we also have a catering business and a corporately themed condiments line. That’s where we generate the majority of our revenue, but then we do rely on some government and philanthropic investment.

The number of people who are coming through our training program is increasing and the level of need that they have has also increased. As well as the on-the-job training that we deliver in the cafe and in the kitchen, we also deliver a huge amount of individualised wraparound support for everyone who engages in the training program. That can be things like literacy and numeracy support, digital inclusion and access, support accessing mental health services, housing, food security, all sorts of things.

You’ve said that it’s not just about getting people to participate in work but helping them thrive.

We really do take a person-centred approach. Every single person who applies for the training program, we sit down with them and ask questions about what sort of support they need so they will be able to have a really positive experience with the training at Hamlet but also improve their chances of finding employment and just improve their day-to-day life. We’ve had applicants who said they have to walk to training because their level of literacy is so low, they can’t read a bus timetable. So, we say: okay, let’s get you literacy support because some basic literacy and numeracy training is needed if you’re going to be able to fully engage in the training program. If you think about having literacy that low, that has a lot of implications for your day-to-day life.

Why have you personally devoted yourself to social enterprise and trying to help people?

I think it’s a really hard industry to move out of. I think having the exposure I did to my brother’s social enterprise, it changes the way you think about doing business. For me, especially when I was working in the food industry, I would get home at night and think, what have I achieved today? Okay, we delivered a lot of food and it was delicious and amazing, but I think when you work for a social enterprise, you leave work every day thinking, wow, I did something important and really powerful today, and something that has meaning for the community that I’m part of. I think the beautiful thing about Hamlet is that we have created a community where we’re able to have conversations about what is going on with the members of that community and how can we, as a community, try to solve this problem.

Are you still as passionate as when you started? Running a cafe is hard enough without it also being a social enterprise.

The 10-year milestone has kind of forced me to pause and reflect quite a bit on what has happened over that time period and what we as an organisation have been able to achieve. There is no denying the fact that this work is really hard. Running a business, especially in the hospitality industry, is hard work, and when you combine that with the social enterprise sector, it’s just a whole other thing. But for me, I can’t imagine doing anything else. I genuinely love my job.

Your work seems deliberately place-based. You’ve talked about how important regions are for teaching about workplaces that work for everyone, and how Tasmania can lead that.

I think the thing that we have found here is that yes, there are solutions that get thrown around at a national level for issues like disability employment and, you know, inclusion in general. What we find here is that it’s actually about working with the employment partners that we’ve developed relationships with, and asking the question: what do you need and what can we assist you with, so that you can become more inclusive in your hiring practices? I don’t think it’s ever a one-size-fit-all approach. I think it really does have to be the communities that you’re working in that develop the solutions to the problems impacting the communities that we’re in.

What’s next for you and for Hamlet? Is the plan to get bigger?

I think our biggest thing is working with what we’ve got. At the moment, we’re doing a lot of work in terms of a project called Next Shift, which we’re launching in the next couple of weeks; it’s about building employment pathway models. It is less to do with working directly with the graduates from our training program and more about working with employers – giving employers the skills and the training that they need to become more inclusive in their hiring practices.

We want to provide employers with ongoing support so that they can employ graduates from our training program and also so that those employment outcomes can be long-term sustainable. Obviously, we provide a lot of ongoing support for graduates in our training program, but we know that their enjoying long-term success isn’t just about them, it’s about their needs creating an actual shift in our industry. Well, I think in industries at large, but especially in the hospitality industry, we want to see things change.