CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- In west suburban Wheaton, there is a coffee company called I Have A Bean.
The name is inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech and this company's dream is that "men and women won’t be preemptively judged by the errors of their past but will be known instead by the present evidence of the content of their character,” said owner Pete Leonard.
Leonard said I Have A Bean is about two things: Producing award-winning coffees and employing formerly incarcerated individuals.
“If most people are like me 15 years ago, I didn’t want anything to do with somebody who had been to prison – [I thought of them as> scary, bad. And then, it was somebody in my family and then I learned [they were> not scary, not bad [but> misrepresented. And he had skills – [he worked as a> programmer, mathematician, database engineer, accountant – and nobody would touch him,” said Leonard.Leonard, who once worked at had a computer programming company, said he needed good coffee to drink and taught himself how to roast beans on his Weber gas grill and sold the coffee to neighbors. So, he married his programming skills with roasting beans and hiring post-prison people. I Have A Bean is located at 655 Childs Street in Wheaton and you can visit it at www. ihaveabean.com.
