Lucian Butnaru

Founder of Cofeels

Lucian Butnaru was very young when he left home; he practically grew up in the boarding school for the blind in Târgu Frumos. He always had vision problems, but they worsened when he was 17.
People are relatively quick to accept that it’s good for a person with disabilities to work; the issue is that they hold onto deeply rooted biases about what these individuals are capable of. And if a person with disabilities tries to assert themselves in a nontraditional field, it won’t be long before someone waves the possibility of failure in their face, masked as a “concerned” question like: “But wouldn’t it have been better, dear, if you’d become a masseur?”

For Lucian, though, success wasn’t about meeting others’ expectations or reaching milestones on a traditional path; success was more about establishing himself in a new field, where he could show that people with disabilities are valuable resources, not just subjects of social policy.

He was a social economy master’s student when he discovered specialty coffee, though his relationship with it would probably have remained at the admiration stage if it hadn’t been for his struggles finding a job.

He began dreaming of a café where he could employ people with disabilities, to make things just a bit easier for others than they had been for him. But first, he had to gain experience himself, and he was so passionate about the field that he offered café owners to work for free just to gain experience. He wrote a business plan for €100,000 in European funding, and in 2021, he opened Cofeels: the first café in Transylvania to employ multiple people with disabilities, including a barista with Down syndrome.

His dream isn’t over, but Lucian doesn’t really believe in a static happy ending. He knows life isn’t like fairy tales, where people live happily ever after, preferably in a uniform “cream of wheat” routine. Just a year ago, something happened that put his dream in serious jeopardy, bringing him uncomfortably close to the brink of failure. But perhaps it’s best to let him tell the story himself on November 23 at #ilovefailure.