COFFEE & CONNECTIONS
Where Coffee Meets Compassion & Connections Change Lives
Coffee & Connections is a trauma-informed café and digital platform in El Paso, offering radical welcome, healing-centered design, and community-rooted support for mental health and advocacy.
Where lived experience, ethical leadership, and shared healing come to the table.
Every seat honors a voice committed to trust, dignity, and community-first growth.
First Name Last Name — Voice of lived military service, healing, and advocacy for those left behind.
First Name Last Name — Focused on compassion-driven care and reshaping access to emotional safety.
First Name Last Name — Uplifting creative paths to healing through storytelling, movement, and expression.
First Name Last Name — Holding space for caregivers, kinship communities, and intersectional family healing.
First Name Last Name — Bridging real-world experience with governance that centers dignity over data.
Ben “The Beanfather” Riley — Believed in the mission before the doors opened.
Founder of The Coffee Veteran, a business built to support disabled veterans and single mothers through community-powered coffee.
Your stories aren’t chapters — they’re declarations.
Declarations that trauma doesn’t define you. That healing is radical. That survival is sacred.
This journal holds every voice that refused erasure, every truth whispered too late, every heart that rose anyway.
I tried to die to make someone care.
Now I live to make sure no one feels alone again.
I survived what never should’ve happened.
So now I build what never existed—a space that sees the whole person before the crisis.
“I came here not knowing if I’d be believed.
Now I tell others—this café gave me a place to exhale.”
“I’ve battled PTSD and addiction.
Coffee & Connections didn’t ask for paperwork — they asked how I was. That changed everything.”
“I tried to push what happened to me to the back of my head, away from my forethoughts — but I realized that talking helps the healing.
Don’t be afraid to speak about what you silently go through.”
“I was sexually assaulted when I was 5.
I grew up with a protective family, and they didn’t know until I was an adult.
Between then and adulthood, I lost many close family members.
I then got married young—to a toxic high school sweetheart.
He maritally raped me on our wedding night, multiple times.
I then joined the military and went through a nasty divorce.
During my time in the military, those I trusted to party with and just hang out with also took advantage of me.
I was sexually harassed multiple times throughout my career.
I was raped over five times, by the same and different people.
I found myself in a cycle of trust, grief, blame, and feeling like I always deserved it all.
I coped extensively with alcohol and couldn’t have felt more alone when trying to get help with that either.
I took a few trips to the mental hospital, had regular therapy, and was just treated like a child by my command.
No one knew the extent of it—and possibly still don’t.
I also attempted suicide about five times—what a failure, right?
But after INTENSIVE self work, healing, and coping (healthy and not), I’d like to share this story.
It’s not normal for your body to be used.
It’s not okay for a Lieutenant to ask you, mid mental breakdown, “WTF is actually wrong with you?”
Or for your battle buddies to be told never to speak to you again because I was a liability or an emotional wildcard.
The anxiety, depression, and PTSD I’ve faced shouldn’t have been so isolated, so alone, so traumatizing in itself.
I now have fibromyalgia, slight agoraphobia, and a few other things I get to deal with every day.
I’ve also had two sexual assaults from soldiers in active duty after I was out.”
This journal holds more than stories — it holds survival, strength, and solidarity.
Whether you share a whisper, a wound, or a moment of triumph, your words may help someone feel seen.