Third Drop Coffee’s new owner, Shawn Gibree, credits volunteers like Moorhead’s Heart of Clay and Fargo’s Cass County Jail Ministry with helping him rebuild his life after years of incarceration and substance abuse. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)Nancy Edmonds Hanson

When Giving Hearts Day rolls around on Feb. 8, Shawn Gibree will be at Third Drop Coffee in downtown Moorhead, trading giant-sized heart-shaped cookies for donated fivers.
The fund raiser goes straight to the heart of what matters. Gibree plans to donate the proceeds generated by hundreds of pink- and red-frosted sugar cookies to Heart of Clay Ministry. The volunteer program helps men and women imprisoned in the Clay County Correctional Facility rebuild their lives – bringing new hope to hearts once filled with despair.
He is an enthusiastic advocate of the program. Gibree credits their Fargo counterpart, the Cass County Jail Ministry, for giving him the support he needed to turn his own life around. With his troubled years behind him, he bought the Moorhead coffee spot last August. Three years earlier, he and wife Misty purchased Babb’s Coffee on Main Avenue in Fargo.
After years in and out of jail, grappling with drug and alcohol addiction, The Massachusetts native has turned his life around … thanks to the volunteers who reached out to assure them their past does not define their future.
“Your past doesn’t have to define your future,” the 52-year-old barista emphasizes. “I’m not a bad person, but I made some really bad choices. My life was a roller coaster until I found God.”
Gibree’s youth was rocky. Afflicted with both ADHD and dyslexia, he was raised by his grandparents until eighth grade, when he moved to Grand Forks to join his father, a retired Air Force veteran. There, he was drawn into the drug trade, “mostly for the thrill of it,” he says. Soon he was dealing methamphetamine with the notorious Gamboa family, leading to what was, in 1999, the largest drug bust in North Dakota history – 500 pounds of methamphetamine, with an estimated street value of $18 million.
He spent six months in the Clay County jail, then was transferred to the federal prison in Florence, Colorado. After his release, he returned to Fargo and worked with Strata Concrete for the next 11 years. But, he says, he relapsed. “I bounced in and out of the county jails nine or ten times,” he says, for all kinds of offenses: “drugs, driving without a license, all kinds of stupid things. I couldn’t figure out how to get clean and stay clean. I lost my five kids, and my wife was ready to divorce me.”
Then he met a Jail Chaplains volunteer. “It started out with a simple gesture – she gave me a homemade cookie,” he says. “It was a simple thing. Someone showed me that I mattered.” The relationship developed. Eventually she gave him a Bible amidst conversations about faith.
He was using meth in the Cass jail at the time. (“You can get anything you want in there,” he claims.) Then he overdosed. “I thought I was going to die,” he recalls. “I hit my knees and asked God to save me. I found God that night.”
Once he’d seen the light, Gibree became deeply involved in the ministry that had saved him. He worked with peer support at Lighthouse Church for three years, mentoring men on parole or probation as they seek to build healthier lives. “We’re all intertwined,” he says of the two county jail ministries and the people they serve. “The river doesn’t separate drug addicts. We recognize each other. Guys have said to me, ‘This must work. I know how bad you used to be.’”
Heart of Clay’s volunteers work with men and women while they are incarcerated as well as after their release, while they’re on parole or probation. The nonprofit operates three “accountability houses” under the banner of Crossing Home, two for men and a third for women. There, they continue the close relationships formed in the jail, providing everything from classes in anger management and managing personal finances to family support and rides to appointments.
Three years ago, Gibree was able to buy Babb’s Coffee House with the help of a private loan from a local benefactor whom he’d met while working for J & K Cleaning Services. “It was a fluke. He’d heard that the owners of Babb’s wanted to sell, and so one day he asked me, ‘Want to buy a coffee shop?’
“I didn’t know a thing about it. I sat at Babb’s every day for a month and a half, watching people come in and go out. That’s what convinced me to try it.”
A newcomer to coffee beans, he says “I’m still learning.” He took a full week of intensive training at Dancing Goat Coffee in Seattle, then mastered the business by trial and error. Then, last April, he got a call from Brett and Nanci Nerland of Moxie Java and Third Drop Coffee. Again, he heard the fateful words: “Want to buy a coffee shop?” He did, and now operates both.
“It’s hard,” he concedes. He spends his days working in the Fargo shop, where all the baking is done, then takes on administrative tasks in Moorhead after both close at 6.
But it’s an extension of the mission he’s taken on to help others who, like himself, have strayed from the straight and narrow and are searching for ways to get back. He knows their daily struggles; he has faced them himself. Now sober for six years, Gibree says, “I was lucky. Some guys don’t get a chance to pick up the pieces. They don’t make it.
“But I saw something in the jail chaplains years ago that I wanted for myself. I wanted to be more than what I was. I wouldn’t have all this, and where my life is at today, if I wouldn’t have found God in that jail cell that night.”