Approved Partners

These are the organizations we work alongside — employment agencies, school districts, settlement and newcomer services, youth programs, and community health and rehabilitation organizations. They run the programs. They know their participants, hold the relationships, and carry the wraparound support that makes a training placement actually work.

We do the coffee portion — and we do it ourselves. We don't hand over a curriculum, licence a program, or train someone else's staff to deliver it. Running a coffee school is our business, built over decades, and it is the thing we do well. Our partners do what they do well.

That is the whole arrangement, and it is why it works: with good partners, everyone knows what lane they are in. They are not trying to become a coffee school. We are not trying to do their job.

This is a different kind of approval from our café and roaster lists, and we want to be straightforward about that. We are not assessing these organizations on roast dates or extraction — those aren't their trade. We are saying we have worked together, the work was real, and we would do it again.

The standard is Canadian. The door is open to the world. CBI Approval was written here, is governed here, and carries the name of a Canadian institute. Every organization below is currently Canadian, for the simple reason that Canada is where our labs are and so far that is who has asked. The arrangement travels, though — an employment agency in Auckland or a college in Dublin running a hospitality program has the same gap we fill here, and the same reason not to try to fill it themselves. We would take that conversation gladly.

In some cases we contribute toward participant tuition through our Changing Lives through Coffee program.

What Partnership Means

Every organization on this list meets the following:

They run a program of their own — employment, education, settlement, youth, or rehabilitation — with participants they are responsible for
They bring us in to teach the coffee portion, rather than improvising it in-house or buying a curriculum off a shelf
The work actually happened: real cohorts, real training days, real people who finished
They stay in their lane and we stay in ours, which is the only reason the training is worth anything to the participant

17 approved partners. Last reviewed: October 2026.

Partnerships are reviewed periodically. If a program ends or a relationship lapses, we remove the listing — this page is meant to be current, not historical.