The British public’s itch for a daily fix of gourmet coffee is to be harnessed to provide jobs and housing for the country’s growing population of rough sleepers.

Coffee trucks selling £2.50 cups of speciality brews from Tanzania, Columbia and Rwanda will go out on to the streets of London this week staffed by the recently homeless. The scheme will later be extended to Bristol, Manchester, Nottingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The baristas will receive training and earn the London living wage of £9.15 an hour. The not-for-profit organisation behind the project, called Change Please, will underwrite tenancies for the workers, who would otherwise struggle to persuade landlords to let them rent a property.

The initiative is backed by the founder of the Big Issue magazine, John Bird, and Cemal Ezel, a social entrepreneur and former commodities trader. It mirrors the Big Issue’s operation, in which homeless people make money by selling the magazine on the streets. But while the circulation of that publication has fallen by more than half in recent years, the British public’s demand for flat whites and hazelnut skinny lattes continues to rise. A further 3,000 coffee shops are expected to open in the UK by 2020. Meanwhile, rough sleeping rose by 14% from 2013 to 2014 across England, and by 37% in London, according to official statistics.

“Coffee is very commercial, it is very communal and it is more and more part of people’s daily habits,” said Ezel, who runs the Old Spike Roastery, employing homeless people in Peckham. “This is about getting people off the streets and into housing.”

A Change Please coffee cart. Photograph: Change Please/PA

At first there will be 12 workers involved with a handful of trucks, but by next year Ezel said there would be around 100 formerly homeless people taking part. Change Please aims to find them full-time work in other established coffee chains after six months, meaning that it hopes to get 200 people a year off the streets and into work and housing.

Peter Bird, John’s brother, who is director of distribution at the Big Issue, said: “The Big Issue works well to provide people currently living on the streets with a way to help themselves work towards a better life, but there is a gap between that segment of homelessness and securing a regular job that needed a solution.”

Change Please expects to place some of its carts inside the offices of large businesses, including Barclays bank, and has secured pitches with major estate owners including British Land and Land Securities. Potential baristas will be referred by local councils and from charities including Crisis and the Big Issue.

Outside London, Change Please will pay its staff the living wage, currently £8.25 per hour, which it believes is typically higher than the amount a barista would earn in a conventional chain coffee shop.

“We guarantee that this programme will make a significant contribution to helping alleviate the homelessness problem across the country – if we can get a small proportion of coffee drinkers to simply change where they buy their coffee, we really could change the world,” said Ezel. “By providing both a job and housing we are immediately lifting people out of homelessness.”