Dallas' Café Momentum goes nationwide to give even more juvenile offenders a second chance

Anyone with a heart can think back to the moment when injustice slammed you hard into the realization that “this is not the world I want to live in, I want to be a part of something different.”

You signed up for a volunteer gig, made generous donations or maybe even protested for change, circulated petitions and influenced colleagues and friends.

If you are like most of us, that epiphany eventually dimmed and you slipped back into the rhythms of your own existence.

For Dallas chef Chad Houser, that moment of clarity never loosened its grip. Instead, it changed his life — and it has changed the lives of more than 1,000 teens whom his nonprofit Café Momentum has provided with second chances.

Many of you are probably familiar with the restaurant’s two-fer work: creating fine meals for guests and employing a staff of young women and men exiting the Dallas County juvenile detention facility. Each 12-month paid internship comes with intense life-skills training and wraparound care.

This fall, a dozen years after Houser first took action against the dead-end injustices in the juvenile system — and five years after he opened Café Momentum — he’s going nationwide with the work.

With $1.9 million from the Stand Together Foundation, Houser is launching the Momentum Advisory Collective to drive his attempt to transform millions of lives and reshape how the U.S. thinks about juvenile justice. Two new restaurants are planned for 2021 and two more in 2022.

The vision is audacious: A country where high-risk kids who come from trauma and lack social-emotional development aren’t put in handcuffs and isolated for their mistakes, but rather are nurtured with support services to be their best selves.

“It’s all about allowing these kids to see themselves for who they truly are, not the constant labels and stereotypes that society unjustly puts on them,” Houser said as he and MAC chief marketing officer Olivia Cole shared their plan with me.

We met Monday at Café Momentum’s modest space in downtown Dallas, just a few days after the restaurant greeted customers for the first time since the pandemic struck in March. To keep the staff employed during those six months, Houser flipped the operation into a food distribution hub, providing 350,000 meals to North Texas students and their families.

He described the restaurant’s reopening as cathartic. “It was hard to tell who was most excited — the guests getting to interact with the kids or the kids because they were getting to interact with the guests.”

But the COVID-19 shutdown, as awful as it’s been in so many ways, provided Houser the time to dive deeper into what he’s trying to accomplish.

Expansion was always part of the plan. How could it not be when more than 700,000 teens enter the juvenile justice system each year across this country?

It’s an epidemic that disproportionately affects children of color; of the teens Houser works with, 63% are Black and 35% are Latino. “And once they enter the system, it’s more likely than not that they will never get out,” he said.

“It’s a travesty because these are amazing kids with incredible amounts of potential.”

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, who also knows a thing or two about restorative justice, is one of Houser’s longtime fans.

“He’s not bringing in cash and then giving it to someone else to try to transform those lives,” Creuzot said. “He is actually taking control of the problem and solving it.”

Creuzot told me that unless you’ve worked directly with these young people, you don’t understand that in most cases, “they don’t have the foundation and support that would allow them to be successful in life.”

“These are kids who are accustomed to being slapped down and arrested,” Creuzot said. “They aren’t accustomed to, after doing something wrong, being told, ‘We’re going to work on this.’”

Creuzot pointed to Houser’s micro approach as the most effective way to solve the macro problem. Each life Café Momentum transforms means one fewer case that the community eventually will deal with at the courthouse.

The Stand Together Foundation’s funding to kick off Houser’s expansion comes with a lofty pronouncement: His is one of 180 top-performing nonprofits capable of intergenerational change to break the cycle of poverty in America.

The foundation’s executive director, Evan Feinberg, said Café Momentum’s transformative model, rooted in a deep belief in people, is what caught Stand Together’s attention.

The restaurant’s track record isn’t too shabby, either: The recidivism rate of the young men and women who work at the restaurant — less than 15% — is almost three times lower than the state’s.

The Cafe Momentum story began in 2008 when Houser, a successful up-and-coming chef on the Dallas food scene, was asked to teach eight teens in juvenile detention how to make ice cream so they could participate in a Farmers Market competition.

Houser told me that he thought he was pretty woke on issues of race, but as he worked with the teens, “I was horrified and ashamed that I had stereotyped them before I ever met them.”

While he made ice cream with them, he listened — and thought hard about the differences between these 16-year-olds and himself at 16.

“Our lives were dictated by choices made for us before we were ever born,” he told me. "Choices based on the color of our skin, our socio-economic class, the part of town we were born into, the resources we had access to.

“It was predetermined, completely different opportunities and paths.”

Houser responded by volunteering more, learning everything he could about the juvenile justice system and figuring out exactly what the young people wanted and needed.

Before opening the downtown Dallas restaurant, Houser employed the teens at popup dinners around town to test his idea. Before COVID, he did the same across the nation as he tested the expansion waters.

The Stand Together Foundation helped Houser make connections with justice-minded NFL players. That led to pop-up restaurant events in Nashville, Los Angeles and during this year’s Super Bowl, in Miami. Those high-profile platforms, with youth recruited from the local juvenile detention systems, introduced the Café Momentum model to interested community advocates.

This is no one-size-fits-all operation, but Houser says some pieces are non-negotiable. For instance, creating the wraparound services center must come first to address trauma and other emotional needs, food insecurity, housing, health care and schooling.

Houser ticked off a few stats about last year’s Café Momentum 182 interns to explain why: 54% were high school dropouts and 42% were homeless — some years that has been as high as 62%.

I suspect the biggest challenge to expansion will be finding a Chad Houser in each city — someone who will care about the young women and men as much as he does.

Houser told me he’s more hopeful today than at any point since he began helping teens. For the first time, “I have people who look like the three of us asking what they can do different. ‘How can I be a part of that change?'

“I love the idea that we can begin to change systems all around the country and that all of that can come out of Dallas.”