Cafe X: By Any Beans Necessary

Mother-Daughter Team Builds Cooperative Coffee Shop in Sherman Heights | Eater San Diego

"A community-minded coffee shop that first opened a storefront on El Cajon Boulevard in late 2019 but was forced to shutter in 2020 after the COVID-19 shutdown and the building’s sale, Cafe X: By Any Beans Necessary is co-owned by Khea Pollard and her mother, Cynthia M. Ajani, and has reopened on Imperial Avenue in Sherman Heights (now open Tuesday through Friday, with a grand opening event held Monday, February 28 from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.). It was created as a welcoming space for artist talks, community discussions, and other events and offers a menu of coffee and tea drinks—ranging from a wild berry tea mixed with lemonade and fresh fruit to the Shabazz, a latte flavored with hot honey and black and white chocolate named for Malcolm X, the cafe’s namesake. Beyond beverages, the cafe is explicitly positioned to help propel systemic change for marginalized communities in San Diego: Pollard and Ajani have made Cafe X a stakeholder in the Black Women’s Resilience Project alongside San Diego for Every Child and Jewish Family Service of San Diego to support generational wealth building and guaranteed income for Black women, and they’re partnering with youth training organizations to create internships that could become cooperative careers; Pollard also plans more employee-owned businesses, including another cafe in the South Bay and eventually a full-service restaurant." - Candice Woo