Behind the espresso bar.
A few mornings a week — and the regulars know the face.
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Why SHAVIM Exists
17 minutes on the vision, the families, and the community we’re building together.
SHAVIM is a community campus in Austin where adults with disabilities, families, volunteers, students, and neighbors share daily life. The café is the heart. Community is the destination.
Because every one is worthy.
Equal is where we begin.
Belonging is where we are going.
Because every one is worthy.
That is why SHAVIM exists.
Start here
17 minutes on the vision, the families, and the community we’re building together.
Most people are sorted by ability. SHAVIM is built so they are not.
A person with a disability spends the day in one place. Their family carries it alone. Neighbors live beside each other and never meet. The systems meant to help keep everyone apart. SHAVIM exists to undo that — not with a program, but with a place where the same day is lived together.
Many people with disabilities are offered care, activities, and support — but not always enough ordinary places to take part, contribute, build friendships, and be known. SHAVIM is a community campus where taking part can look like many things: work, learning, creativity, friendship, events, and shared daily life.
Families hold the weight without rest or company. SHAVIM is a place they can hand part of it to — and stay for coffee, not just drop-off.
A neighborhood can share a street for years and remain strangers. SHAVIM is the table where difference meets — and stops being a reason to stay apart.
This campus will not be built by staff. It will be built by a community.
SHAVIM is not built for the community. It is built by it. The café, the garden, the studio, the playground — these are not delivered to a neighborhood. They are raised by it, together, the way real places have always been made. If you build, design, grow, teach, fund, or simply care — there is a place for your hands here.
A community built by everyone, for everyone.
The heart of the campus.
Pottery. Art. Making by hand.
Growing food and each other.
A trusted place to breathe.
Better ways to take part.
Coffee in the morning. Work done together — by the people the neighborhood used to overlook. It’s where neighbors arrive as strangers and, table by table, become part of the community.
Select a place to look inside.
SHAVIM does not serve people. It connects them.
A service moves in one direction — someone gives, someone receives. SHAVIM is built the other way. Everyone who walks in is both. The café needs the barista. The garden needs the hands. The student learns as much as they teach. Belonging is not given here. It is made, together, by people who would otherwise never meet. SHAVIM is built by that community — not for it.
do real work, in public, beside everyone else.
find rest, company, and a place that knows them.
come for a shift and find they belong to something.
learn by doing, and design what comes next.
buy what the garden grows and the studio makes.
have coffee where the neighborhood actually meets.
bring a university, a kitchen, a craft into the day.
walk in for the café and leave part of the community.
Composite stories — illustrative of the SHAVIM model, not specific individuals.
A few mornings a week — and the regulars know the face.
A parent who came for drop-off and stayed for coffee.
What a student finds at the long table.
A neighbor business, woven into the day.
Not a store. A way to take part in the economy.
Most people earn their place in the world through work that is bought and sold. People with disabilities are usually left out of that exchange. The SHAVIM Marketplace is built to put them inside it — a shared shelf where many makers sell, and every sale is participation, not charity.
Mugs, bread, seeds, towels — made on the campus.
Independent makers sell under their own name.
Other inclusive workshops share the shelf.
Products designed and tested here reach the market.
Companies buy at scale — gifts that carry a wage.
An inclusive playground. Products made and tested here. A living lab where ideas are designed, tested, and built with the people who will use them.
See where this goesWe are not building one café. We are building proof that a place like this works.
The café, garden, studio, and lab running as one daily rhythm. A few dozen people with disabilities in real work. Families who count on it. A neighborhood that treats it as theirs.
The way SHAVIM works — mixed-ability participation, family support, a shared marketplace — documented and shared, so other communities can build their own, in their own place, their own way.
A generation that grew up where ability was never the question. Places like SHAVIM understood not as charity, but as how a healthy community is simply built.
We grow slowly and on purpose. New places come only after the first one has earned the right to be copied.
What should still be here long after us.
SHAVIM is a place. What grows out of it is bigger than a place.
A campus you can walk into — and a way of living together that can take root anywhere. Belonging, participation, dignity, shared life. The campus is its home. The movement is what it makes possible.
Because every one is worthy.
Why this place. Why this city. Why now.
Austin grows fast and still believes in community. There is room here to build something new — and partners to build it with: a university, a civic culture, neighbors who show up.
Families are carrying more, alone, for longer. Services exist; belonging doesn’t. The gap is not for lack of care. It is for lack of a place where care and ordinary life happen together.
The answer was never one more program. It was a kitchen, a garden, a table — somewhere the day is genuinely shared, and no one is the project.
We are trying to make one idea obsolete: that where you spend your day, and who you spend it with, should be decided by what you can or cannot do.
SHAVIM didn’t begin as a nonprofit, a campus, or a plan. It began with a question after 2006, a daughter named Eli, and a café owner named Azri — whose Friday-morning welcome showed our founder what belonging really looks like.
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