Connect Cafe

Connect Cafe is a scratch-kitchen coffee shop and lunch counter at 756 Armstrong Ave in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, operating out of the street-level basement of the former Kansas City Kansan newspaper building. It is the social-enterprise arm of the nonprofit FosterAdopt Connect: the staff are young people aged roughly 17–24 who are in or aging out of foster care, working 9–12 month paid placements that pair restaurant work with résumé, budgeting and job-skills instruction. Opened October 2022; run day-to-day by Randy Ross, formerly a co-owner of McGonigle’s Market.

Description

Connect Cafe is a coffee shop and scratch lunch counter at 756 Armstrong Avenue in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, at the corner of North 8th Street. It occupies the street-level basement of the old Kansas City Kansan newspaper building, which the nonprofit FosterAdopt Connect bought around 2020 intending to use the three-story structure for offices and programming. The basement level opened onto the street, and the organization decided it would work better as a cafe than as more office space. Connect Cafe opened in October 2022.

The cafe exists to employ people it would otherwise be serving. Its staff are young people roughly 17 to 24 years old who are currently in foster care or have recently aged out of it, hired into paid placements of about nine to twelve months. The work is real restaurant work — espresso, food prep, register — wrapped in instruction on the things that do not come with a foster-care upbringing: customer service, résumé writing, budgeting, taxes, time management. Program staff have described a no-termination policy, working alongside employees rather than firing them when something goes wrong. Youth in the program also have access to free meals on shift, a food pantry, and the organization’s clothing closet.

Operations are run by Randy Ross, who came out of the restaurant industry — he was a co-owner of McGonigle’s Market — and whose wife Lori Ross founded and leads FosterAdopt Connect, a nonprofit serving both Missouri and Kansas. The couple have been foster parents for more than 35 years.

The kitchen is a scratch kitchen: coffee drinks and espresso, pastries and baked goods made in house, and a breakfast-and-lunch menu of soups, salads, wraps and sandwiches, plus house-made jams sold by the jar. The room carries work by local artist Michael Brantley. The cafe has been voted a “Kansas City Favorite” in the Kansas City Star’s readers’ poll in multiple consecutive years, and in the 2025 edition took Gold for Best Salad and Silver for Best Bakery, Best Brunch and Best Diner. “ for the primary Star poll results page — the award tally is reported on the operator’s own site rather than sourced to the Star directly.

In the early hours of Sunday, June 15, 2025, two burglars smashed the front glass doors with a rock from the landscaping, took a cash register containing only coins, and destroyed the ordering and payment hardware — about $1,700 in damage, covered under a high-deductible policy. The cafe reopened the following Tuesday on its normal hours after the local restaurant group KC Hopps donated replacement point-of-sale equipment.

Menu

Last verified: 2026-08-13 · Source: operator’s own catering price list on fosteradopt.org¹ · menu_status: partial · Confidence: Medium.

Only the catering price list is published first-party. The daily cafe menu (coffee drinks, breakfast and lunch entrees) is described in press and on the operator’s pages but no first-party in-house price list was reachable — connectcafe.org returned HTTP 403 to every automated request on 2026-08-13. Aggregator and delivery-platform prices are deliberately not transcribed. Prices below are catering-format and are not the walk-up counter prices.

Catering — coffee

• Coffee box, 96 oz (about 12 servings) — $36¹
• Coffee box, 192 oz (about 20 servings) — $60¹

Catering — food

• Sandwich / salad platter, large (10–14 servings) — $90¹
• Garden salad bowl (10 servings) — $50¹
• Boxed lunch — $13.95¹
• Muffin — $2.95¹
• Croissant — $3.95¹
• Cinnamon roll — $3.45¹

Catering orders require 48 hours’ notice.¹

Sources

Links

• Website: https://connectcafe.org/
• Operator page: https://www.fosteradopt.org/locations/connect-cafe/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConnectCafeKCK/
• The Pitch profile: https://www.thepitchkc.com/connect-cafe-is-providing-a-nurturing-environment-for-youth-aging-out-of-foster-care/

Footnotes

1. FosterAdopt Connect — official page, “Connect Café | Coffee Shop in Kansas City, KS” — asserts: address 756 Armstrong Ave, KCK 66101; phone (913) 214-8027; hours Mon–Fri 7 a.m.–2 p.m., closed weekends; social-enterprise program of FosterAdopt Connect; purpose of providing foster youth with work experience and job skills; scratch-made breakfast/lunch menu of soups, salads, wraps and sandwiches plus coffee, pastries and baked goods; every catering item and price in the Menu section; 48-hour catering notice; the “Kansas City Favorite” recognition and 2025 Gold/Silver award tally; link to connectcafe.org. First-party (operating organization’s own site). (Accessed 2026-08-13.) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰