Our island team moved out of the 'garage' and into a cafe in South Jakarta. It was a hidden oasis on one of the city's busiest streets, tucked away from the chaos amidst a lush green garden, and cold beers. Here, the basics of our 'evo hub' would be established. We grew vegetables and herbs in our garden. We hosted film screenings and talks. We celebrated pioneers in sustainability and eco tourism. We experimented with superfoods and aimed to convert carnivores into vegetarians and vegans. We enjoyed fusion cocktails mixing ginger with honey and vodka, and kombucha with social enterprise wine sourced in Bali.
How to transition a bar into a community center? How to transform a place that didn't really have anything to do with sustainability to fully embrace it, and realize that this transformation would be good for our current customers? We faced some uphill battles, and many of them were lost. We did win some battles, and we did manage to keep the place afloat over the years, but it was an incredibly trying time and we almost went bankrupt many times ( in fact, we did many times but the founder subsidized the cafe's existence).
