It’s late morning at Palate Coffee Brewery in downtown Sanford and — with college students, the suit-and-tie-contingent, a pair of young couples and a cupcake-munching toddler — the place is mobbed.
Tina Kadolph, one of the owners, hurriedly wipes crumbs from a table and shakes her head. “It’s amazing,” she says of the crowd. “We started out not really knowing anything about coffee. We just wanted to be part of the community.”
Although sales are brisk for the 2-year-old coffeehouse, for Kadolph, 56, this isn’t so much a business as a mission — and a deeply personal one.
Kadolph is a survivor of human trafficking. And Palate Coffee, a sunny little space on West Second Street, is a way to raise awareness and money. No one here is paid a salary. Instead, more than $36,000 worth of food, coffee, clothes, hygiene necessities and cash have been donated to victims and at-risk women and children so far.
“I see the people who come in and say, ‘This place is different.’ And then I get to share that we are fighting human trafficking, and that’s where the profits go, and we’re completely run by volunteers,” she says. “And people get excited about that.”
In the beginning, Kadolph rarely shared her history. But in recent months, she has spoken out repeatedly — testifying to legislators for a bill that would have held businesses accountable for allowing human trafficking on their premises. Although the bill failed at the 11th hour after pressure from Florida’s hotel industry, Kadolph and other survivors won support from around the state, and advocates vow to try again next year.
“We’re heartbroken,” she says. “But we’re never going to give up.”
Her Sanford coffeehouse is 3,000 miles from the California motels of her childhood. There, Kadolph has testified, she was sold for sex by her mother, a prostitute, from age 4 to 16. She rarely went to school, often was drugged and came to believe she was “garbage.”
“I would go to school and then miss a lot. And then I would go again and miss a lot. And people knew something was wrong. I was very withdrawn,” she says. “When I was about 8, a truant officer came to check on why I was missing so much school. And I thought, finally, someone is going to find out. But instead, my mom had sex with him.”
The officer never reported anything, and no one ever came back, she says. Instead, when she was 16, she ran away and into a marriage with a man who beat her. She escaped him two years later after he was arrested.
At 20, she met Carl Kadolph, a general contractor and, later, a pastor. And she did her best to be “normal.”
“I was a crazy mess,” she says. “And he saved me. And then I had my girls, and when they got to be 4 and 6, about the age I was when [the sexual abuse] started, I had a breakdown and was hospitalized. And all those things I hadn’t dealt with started coming out.”
It was, she says now, a good thing. It started the process of healing and led, in 2000, to the launch of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Love Missions, which she runs with her husband.
As she talks, Carl is in Guyana with their adopted son, Devon, working with students from Palm Beach Atlantic University to build a safe house there for trafficked girls, ages 4 to 11. It is slated to open at the end of summer.
University students are spending their spring break volunteering at the coffee shop, alongside Kadolph’s 30-year-old daughter, Katrina, and her husband, Charles Lemmon, a firefighter when he’s not serving coffee.
“My mom is the perfect mom,” Katrina says. “She had to make a choice to be so different than what her mom was. She’s unbelievable.”
In fact, Kadolph has a deeply maternal nature, not just with her own children but with the university volunteers and other survivors, including those who stood with her in Tallahassee.
“People just feel safe around her,” says Mark Kaprive, Palm Beach Atlantic’s director of ministries and missions. “She has a very calm, loving spirit.”
It was Kaprive who asked her to share her personal story in public for the first time in 2014. That year, it was just before one of his classes — maybe 15 or 20 students. Then he asked her to give the keynote address at a week of campus seminars on trafficking. About 500 people showed up.
“I was so nervous,” she says. “I’m still nervous. There’s still a lot of underlying fear about exposing yourself that way. But I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve decided that, however people react, I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing this because I want to help other people — little girls especially. I know when I was in that place, I felt there was no hope, and I want them to see that there is.”
So she has been speaking out ever since — before the Legislature, at news conferences, to college classes and women’s groups and various clubs.
And adult survivors are starting to hear about the coffee shop and are finding their way there, looking for a kindred spirit. Other people with their own stories, not necessarily of trafficking, have come hoping for answers to questions they can’t articulate.
“I read about this place on Facebook about a year ago, and I was really shy, but I came — and I’ve been coming ever since,” says Deborah Lopez, 40, a patron turned volunteer. “At first, I just wanted to be part of something, but I find that now I’m a bit kinder to others. Maybe it’s all the free hugs I get.”
ksantich@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5503. Follow @katesantich on Twitter.
