Meet Our Founder

Hello. I am Angela Tiana Hellmers-Holmes, and I am the founder of The Tiana Project, a coffee shop employing homeless and reformed convicts. I am currently in my fourth year of undergrad at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. I will be getting two bachelor’s degrees, one in psychology and the other in sociology. After my bachelor's, I plan to further my education in both areas as well as go to medical school. While attending SMU, I have continued to work full-time on top of my full-time school schedule. I have had the privilege of working in the recruiting department of the SMU football team, as well as being a student manager for the women’s basketball team, so I guess you could say sports is one of my many hobbies. Switching gears from my life now, my childhood was quite chaotic. I come from a broken family where my parents come from two completely different upbringings. My mother was adopted by a well-off middle-class family in rural Nebraska, and my father is from a one-parent military household. In addition to my mother and father, I have a stepmom from a middle-class family in Detroit, Michigan. With this kind of diversity in upbringings, I saw a broad spectrum of normality for each parent. I became increasingly curious about these differences and the people they grew up to be as I got older, and how they shaped who I am today.

In high school, I realized that people tend to end up in different places later on in life based on the access to resources they have growing up. I also realized that was not fair. This developed into a passion for wanting to help underprivileged people. The idea of this nonprofit first popped into my head during my sophomore year in high school, and has finally came to fruition. I chose a coffee shop because I love coffee, so why not combine something I’m passionate about and love. I think it is also a good way to introduce people back into the greater society without too close of proximity. It will be easier for a “regular” member of society to be comfortable with a member of a community with a bad reputation to make their coffee rather than work beside them. It will also be less intimidating and hopefully less overwhelming for someone of such a vulnerable population to make a coffee than take on a major, “more important” job. I believe this will be a good transition for them back into a functioning society, as well as for me into the business world. The end goal of this is to clean up our urban areas and minimize the wealth and education gap between social classes, creating a better, more functioning society as a whole.