From the Field: Coffee
An Update from the field
This week we’re excited to share some things we’ve been working on, as we strengthen our coffee offering with new designs and new products. While exciting in themselves, for us they represent so much more.
For years we’ve been on a journey alongside entrepreneurs in coffee communities; with each new group in our fellowship we are both teachers and students, adjusting and adapting our partnership to ensure that our trainings are relevant, our responses are timely, our impact is real. It’s a dynamism that is only possible because of our amazing field staff, working day in and day out with the fellows in our programs.
As we continue this process, we have seen our organizational path increasingly intertwined with the realities of the farmers we work with, and the supply chain they’re a part of. While in earlier days it didn’t seem necessary- or even feasible- to embed ourselves further in that industry, over the last 2 years it’s felt like the natural growing step.
We love that we have been so focused on the producer side, learning and building services around best coffee farming practices, personal development and business planning, entrepreneurship and success of farmers and their families.
Along the way we have learned multitudes about how all aspects of the coffee industry are connected- how the trees we provide are essential to a family’s future success, how proper care of those trees is needed for a higher quality harvest, how a well functioning washing station must pay better prices to value a farmer’s work, how that washing station should enforce best practices to highlight the quality of harvest, and how producers can use their role to be an open conduit between consumers and farmers, building equity in the supply chain.
The farmers we work with are some of the most dedicated people we know, and we are proud to bring their harvest and story to a growing audience. There are many parts of the coffee industry that have become entrenched in an imbalance of power, and we aim to be one small force to push against that, to shed light on some unknown places and to reimagine the good that can be brought out.
These are our motivations behind each step forward in coffee. While committed as ever to our support programs for fellows, we are also committed to bringing their product to market, and doing so in a way that honors the cyclicality and connectedness of the whole process.
New bags, a new video, new blends are exciting things - but they are small things. The big things, the important things, are the impact these things can have: bringing farmers’ stories to new people, more people; generating awareness for producers around the world; increasing revenues to farmers for their harvest; building a network of support around entrepreneurs and their families as they construct a stronger future.
Thank you for being a part of all these things, big and small.
Learn more about our coffee products and buy your favorite blends: