Zenat Begum Is Redefining What A Coffee Shop Can Be — And The Community It Serves

“Having access to health care shouldn’t be radical. Having access to food shouldn’t be radical. It is radical in that we are changing the ways that we have access to things and how we are able to distribute those kinds of resources to people. That, for me, is radical, is to be able to shift that power,” she said. “Radical is being able to use the same tools that white people and rich people and non-marginalized, non-Black people have used for years, to then restructure those things to serve us.”

Founded in 2016, Playground Coffee Shop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, is much more than a coffee shop. It supports artists from marginalized communities through a radio network and a bookshop selling books and art. A nonprofit, Playground Youth, runs free or donation-based classes on a variety of topics including poetry, sewing, health care access and voter registration. Pre-pandemic, the shop hosted lots of these classes and other community events, like art fairs, open mic nights and film screenings.

Like many small businesses, Playground had to pivot last spring, when New York became one of the epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. Begum, 27, and her staff set up and stocked community fridges to help neighbors facing food insecurity. They built a sidewalk library for people to take and leave books by authors from marginalized backgrounds. During the summer, they distributed personal protective equipment and meals to Black Lives Matter protesters.

Playground’s physical space sits in the same storefront that housed the hardware store run by Begum’s parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh.

“A lot of my first experiences are not tied to being an American. It’s tied to being Bangladeshi first and being a child of immigrants first, and seeing my parents go through a trial and error for most of their life and trying to figure out what an American life looks like,” she said.

She sees Playground as “a continuation of what my parents had given me via their hardware store,” which closed in 2015 — a space that provides for the community around it, a space built around “survival” and “safety.”

“Why are we here? Why is there a business that’s opening, if not to help the people who are neighboring it or communing around it?” she said. “I know what it means to be in a very difficult place: being food insecure and being housing insecure for most of my life, and my parents having to deal with people foreclosing on our house and stuff like that. I know what it feels like to have things ripped away from you.”

For Begum, Playground’s worker- and community-centered operation allows for greater agency and control in a system where Black and brown people are so often given little agency and control. It allows for marginalized people to directly build “systems of care and networks of care.”

“That level of autonomy is very satisfying because you know, we’re actively talking about defunding the police, we’re actively talking about abolishing the police and what those structures look like,” she said. “And this is what that exactly looks like, is being able to trust your community members to know that, like, if shit hits the fan, as things become really difficult and people lose aid, that we will be there.”

She’s conscious of how so much of this work has happened out of necessity and in the absence of government and institutional action, which the COVID-19 pandemic further illustrated. Throughout 2020, small-business owners and community leaders like Begum found innovative ways to step up and provide for their neighbors — but that didn’t have to happen. The effects of this broken system existed far before COVID-19, and without widespread change, they will continue long after. For Begum, that means continuing this community-centered work and building support systems from the ground up.

“If we’re going to actively try to abolish this system that is so dangerous and so harmful for Black and brown people, we have to gain that trust within ourselves and create these networks. And it’s so important, more than ever, right now, for people to mobilize within their small communities because grassroots is the most effective, in my opinion,” she said. “I just hope that people have it within themselves to keep going because we need everybody.”

If anything, Begum’s experience launching and growing Playground and building on that work during the pandemic has taught her that if you don’t have the tools, you can create them yourself. If you’re marginalized, you can use that marginalization as a strength.

“I can’t change the way that our restaurant industry is failing. But at the same time, if we don’t have adequate systems of care, we’re gonna lose a lot more people than we think,” she said. “If these government agencies are not going to help us, we’re going to do it ourselves, and I think that’s what changing your culture is and shifting your culture is: is to make yourself be seen and be heard.”