Lone Tree Cafe Takes on Teen Suicide, One Meeting at a Time

Around seventy teenagers are milling around, chatting and eating chicken wings on a Monday night. They catch up with old friends and make new ones before settling down into small groups to partake in their weekly activity. It’s a week and a half before Thanksgiving, so they each write a thoughtful letter to someone in their life that they are thankful for. 

The teens are members of Happy Crew, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting youth mental health and building community. Students have the opportunity to pop in or join every Monday meeting during the school year at Happy Crew Coffee House. 

The cafe is their safe space at night, but it’s also open to the public weekdays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every cup of coffee supports the important work that Happy Crew does for local youths. 

Amy Mays began hosting weekly meetings with middle schoolers in 2013 and high schoolers in 2015. Mays taught the teens to learn coping and resilience skills and to realize how much they matter. She was previously a youth director at a church for a decade. Mays also has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and works as a primal question coach, helping clients unlearn unhealthy patterns developed during childhood. 

During the 2014-2015 school year, eight students died by suicide in Douglas County, and the group grew in response. A parent asked Mays to come in and chat with some students who were teammates of one of the teens who passed away. 

“ We just talked about survivor’s guilt and ‘how did we not know?’ And sometimes, the truth is you can’t know,” Mays says. “So we started Happy Crew at that point, and the kids just organized and said, ‘No more.’”

The teens distributed $7,000 worth of full-size candy bars with stickers that read, “You matter,” to classmates across the county for three semesters. (They have since pivoted to a lower-cost alternative, stickers.) 

“ It’s a whole lot easier to approach [students] if you have a vehicle, rather than just [saying], ‘It’s gonna sound weird, but in case you’re having a bad day, you can talk to me,’” Mays notes. “It’s easier to just hand ’em a sticker and say, ‘Hey, I want you to know you matter, and we meet, and we’d love to have you join us.’ So that’s how meeting every Monday night started.”

Happy Crew Coffee House opened on March 1 at ​​9044 Forsstrom Drive in Lone Tree. It boasts a large open space with floor-to-ceiling garage door windows, cozy couches and chairs, and a variety of beverages and baked goods. It’s a calm, sunny cafe that caters to people searching for a slower-paced work environment, says general manager Jess Hayward. 

“ This isn’t like a Starbucks where we’re trying to crank out as much as we can, and all of the morning commuters are coming in and just trying to get their coffee,” she says. “This is a space where people are having really intentional meetings either for work or with people they love, or studying for school.”

Customers can stop in for a casual visit or join the shop’s membership program. Members pay between $25 and $200 per month for student, individual or corporate memberships. That fee then acts as a credit toward food and beverages. Any credit leftover at the end of the month becomes a donation to Happy Crew. 

“ We just really encourage membership because we want the community to feel at home here,” Mays notes. “I’ve heard people say, ‘This is my third space. I’m going to go work here because this is good. It’s not my office. It’s not home, but it’s where I want to be.’”

Membership allows for more funding for Happy Crew, which means more teens feeling supported and loved, says Mays, who recalls one student telling her, “This place is peace. We’re not in our cliques anymore when we walk through that door. We’re just family.”

Avery Whitney is a Happy Crew student leader and runs the nonprofit’s Instagram. “ Since coming to Happy Crew, I’ve learned a lot of skills on how to be vulnerable, and the topics and discussions have allowed me to open up to strangers or even people I’ve met recently in the past couple of weeks,” she says.

Mays dreamed of opening a space like Happy Crew Coffee House for ten years, and a $240,000 grant from Douglas County finally made it possible. That amount covered the cafe’s first year of rent plus supplies and support for Happy Crew meetings. 

According to its website, the nonprofit is aiming to support 1,000 teens in the program by 2027.

“ I feel like this is a commonly heard thing, but it’s the truth: The kids are our future. I think investing in kids is always good for them and for everyone,” Hayward concludes. “If you’re going to get coffee, you might as well get coffee with a cause.”

Happy Crew Coffee House is located at 9044 Forsstrom Drive in Lone Tree and is open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, visit happycrewcoffeehouse.com.