I bet you know Holli with an “i” even if you don’t know the name. She has been in southern Berkshire County a long time, mostly as your friendly neighborhood barista, though she has recently gone from employee to owner. Most days, she can be found bustling around the “shoebox” space that is her business, the little yellow coffee house adjacent to the “Flying Church.” Sometimes, though, Holli seems to be everywhere—she’s also a prominent moderator on Great Barrington’s Facebook Community Board, where she navigates the difficult line between allowing free exchange of ideas and preventing slander.
We met at her eponymous café at the end of a weekday workday, when the snow was just starting to fall outside the festively decorated windows.
Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and chronology.
SHEELA CLARY
What’s your Berkshire County origin story?
HOLLI STANTON
I came here in 2000, on the Leap Year day, from New Jersey to Stockbridge. I went to the DeSisto School for almost five years. When they closed in the summer of 2004, they sent us to Mexico because they had a campus in San Miguel de Allende.
CLARY
Beautiful place! Wow. So do you mind my asking, did you come from privilege?
STANTON
No, I didn’t. My family was working class. I grew up in Secaucus and Wayne, N.J. But I was in foster care from nine to 14, and I moved 11 times. I was kind of adopted by my gym teacher and her husband, and they helped pay for me to go to the school. DeSisto was $80,000 a year, but a lot of the program was structured on a work-based concept.
CLARY
How much of it was traditional classes?
STANTON
We did three classes a day, and they did January workshops, where you could make up stuff or do something fun. One January I went to Arizona with a girls’ trip and we did work in a soup kitchen called Paz de Cristo. We spent a month doing that, living with a staff member’s family. He was Mormon, and we learned all about Mormon people.
I would say my time at DeSisto was a net positive overall. It’s complicated. I came back here because living with my family was not really an option. I worked at Radio Shack [in the Price Chopper plaza] from like 2005 to 2009 or so, then I was working for a long time at Main Street Café in Stockbridge, and that’s where I really got into doing coffee. One day Robbie Robles at SoCo made this latte with chocolate, and he drew in it, and that was, like, the coolest thing in the world to me. I’d never seen it. That gave me a strong interest in making coffee and wanting to make coffee that was visually impressive.
CLARY
When did you start working at Fuel?
STANTON
My son Lincoln was two, so maybe a couple weeks after they reopened in the new spot across the street [on Main Street in Great Barrington] in 2016. I was never in management. I was a barista, and I just sort of made it my life there, you know? I left in February 2024.
CLARY
I’m assuming that you like working with the public?
STANTON
I would consider myself an introvert, though, so I can do this, but then I have to go home and regroup and recover from it.
CLARY
So, about the Facebook Community Board moderating. Who did you take over for?
STANTON
Art Ames.
CLARY
How long have you been doing that?
STANTON
It’s probably been five or six years. It’s more of a curse than a blessing.
CLARY
You feel obliged to keep doing it?
STANTON
Yeah. I like to be able to see the misbehavior from the back side, you know? I deeply respect anonymity, from going to so many 12-step meetings with the boarding school. But when people try to post anonymously, the admins know who you are. We know who you are. Jesus knows who you are.
CLARY
Now tell me how Café Holli came about.
STANTON
After I left Fuel, I was working at Bistro Box for the season, and I picked up a July 4th shift. I don’t know where I was going that day, but I drove by, and there were newspapers on the window, and they were yellow, definitely not brand new, and I’m like, ‘Damn.’ So I found Paul [Joffe, the owner,] online. I met him that night and signed the lease the next day with no real plan.
I borrowed money from people here and there, called in as many favors as I could. Braden Weller did my coffee machines—he’s my coffee service guy, and I was like, ‘Listen, give me like two months to pay the rest of this balance off.’ I just pulled it together. I bought some equipment from Robbie, because he was getting rid of things. When we opened it was definitely a bootstrap situation. I signed on July 5th, and I was open September 28th.
CLARY
You set such a welcoming, low-key tone.
STANTON
I think it’s important to make people feel seen. Little things like just knowing their name, knowing their drink when they come in and not needing to ask questions. Or you haven’t seen somebody all winter and you’re like, ‘How was Florida?’ when they come back. Coffee shops have a soul and a whole vibe, and it’s the people, too, that make up the whole. It’s the heartbeat of the coffee shop. You have like a little shtick with each person.
But I can only fit so many people in here legally. I had to focus on the working crowd. You have a whole working-class crowd of people who have to be to work at seven, so I get here at 4:55 most mornings. If I’m here at like 5:10, I feel very rushed. I open at 6:30 every day, Sunday at 8, but we have a not-secret policy of letting people in an hour before we open. If I have any breads or cakes left over, that’s what you get, but I’ll serve you any coffee before I open. The guy at 5:40 in the morning is generally thrilled to get a couple of coffee. We get a lot of the nurses going in, too.
CLARY
You recently donated coffee to the People’s Pantry for Thanksgiving. Tell me about that.
STANTON
We saw that article about this other coffee shop helping with breakfasts for SNAP recipients, and I said, ‘Well, we can do that too.’
You know, I hate seeing people… I’ve been in the position of being hungry. When I was pregnant with my son, it was very tight. I wasn’t working. If you can feed people and take care of them, it’ll always come back to you. I wish that we could help more. I wish that I could be a bit more of a nonprofit.
I’m not looking to buy a yacht, you know, but I would like to be able to buy four tires at one time and not be stressed about it. Other than that, all I really want in life is to be happy. I would like to feel like a sense of belonging in a community, that I’m a part of something. I’ve never really had that, aside from when I was at boarding school.
CLARY
I know people who will drive miles out of their way not to drive down Main Street in Great Barrington because they feel so resentful about how inaccessible it is for them. What makes you feel hopeful on a regular basis?
STANTON
There’s all this amazing stuff here, cultural stuff, and all these great restaurants and hotels and spas and all that. But then you have people running them who can’t afford to be living here. There are a lot of really good people in this town who have a lot of good intentions and truly want to help other people. You can throw money at things. You can donate stuff. There has to be a desire to actually make a difference rather than putting a Band-Aid on it. There’s a lot of people in this community who struggle, who are the foundation of what makes the communities run. You need gas station workers. You need people to work at Dollar General. It’s not a glamorous place to work. They’re not going to get rich.
CLARY
The elephant in the room is always affordability. I know you live at Bentley Apartment because I saw you in the CDC film, but your employees, do any of them live in town?
STANTON
I have seven employees; they’re all young, mostly single mothers. Most of them live within three miles of downtown. I have one who’s in Canaan, Conn., and I have two in places like Bentley. It’s hard. I have not been paid a living wage in 15 months myself, because I’m supporting seven other families. A lot of these people who are doing these service industry jobs aren’t paid enough.
CLARY
Community is built the ways that you’re doing it, knowing people’s name, valuing relationships, having this kind of reciprocal, low-key way of doing things.
STANTON
I see people who make other people feel bad if they don’t know what something is. If somebody will ask, ‘What’s a cortado?’ I’m like, ‘You are in the right place.’ I will explain it. It’s not that serious. It’s just a cup of coffee.
CLARY
[Looking at the coffee board] And you spelled everything right! I’m an Italian spelling snob because I teach Italian, and you spilled ‘macchiato’ and ‘cappuccino’ right.
STANTON
If you look at it though, she didn’t at first, and I had to have her come back to correct it, and it was upsetting.
CLARY
[Delighted] Are you annoyed with spelling errors too?
STANTON
The gym teacher got me in those habits of spelling and proper grammar and enunciation. Like, you don’t wear ‘mih-ens’ and you don’t have ‘buh-ons,’ you have ‘mittens’ and ‘buttons.’
