Coffee Kids blog

Monday, December 22, 2008

Coffee Kids Visits Supporters in EU/UK

In November, Coffee Kids Executive Director Carolyn Fairman took advantage of Coffee Kids’ appearance at the Trieste Espresso show in Trieste, Italy, to visit a number of Coffee Kids’ supporters throughout the EU and the UK.

It was an extremely busy trip as Fairman first met with our friends at the Java Republic in Ireland. She gave a presentation to employees, vendors and friends of the company at their new roastery in Dublin.

The meeting had an athletic bent as Alan Leckey, owner of Real Roast Coffee and a Java Republic distributor, presented Fairman with a check for the funds he collected on his trek up Denali (Mt. McKinley) in Alaska. Bart Glover and his amazing Coffee Kids Cycling Team also presented Fairman with an oversized check from their fundraising ride through the French Alps.

In Glasgow, Scotland, Membership and Development Manager Heather Ferraro and Fairman met with Ewan Reid and Pamela Stewart of Matthew Algie. This amazing group has persevered following the loss of Managing Director David Williamson who passed away this past spring. David was a strong Coffee Kids supporter and Matthew Algie continues his commitment.

Ferraro and Fairman met with Lord Innes Catto, Mike Segal, Rob Stephen in London for Coffee Kids UK annual board meeting.

The Espresso Expo in Trieste, Italy, showcased many aspects of the Italian and international coffee trade, especially espresso machines. Special thanks go to Fiera Trieste for providing Coffee Kids with display space in the expo hall. Coffee Kids staff met with C.M.A. and other great supporters in Italy.

We’d also like to thank Peter Kirton with Esquires; Jeremy Knight and Heather Lawrence with Red Cup; Tim Lively and Nick Higginson with Shakespeare Coffee Company, and Helen Ostle with Beyond the Bean for their continuing support and for meeting with us during our trip.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Holiday Fundraisers Benefit Coffee Farming Families

It’s just a few more days until the holiday season really hits full swing. Some of our members are holding fundraisers for Coffee Kids. Today is the last day of the Green Coffee Co-op’s fundraiser for Coffee Kids. Also, be sure to check out the Coffee Kids’ online shop for gift ideas for the coffee lover in your family.

Our first one is from Seattle Coffee Gear, who will contribute 5% of all sales of Lavazza’s Tierra coffee to Coffee Kids from now until Jan. 15. For more information, click here.

The Green Coffee Co-op will hold a fundraiser from 12/8-12/18 on their Web site. They plan to raffle off a Behmor 1600 coffee roaster donated by Joe Behm of Behmor. Chances cost $25 each through the direct link on their page to the Coffee Kids donation page. They also will hold an online auction for items donated by their members, which will conclude on 12/18. Visit the Green Coffee Co-op site for more details.

Chicco di Caffé with shops near Munich, Germany, will donate 1 Euro for every coffee sold on December 22 and HypoVereinsbank will double the amount.

The Coffee Exchange in Providence, R.I., will hold their annual New Year’s Day fundraiser for Coffee Kids.

This one isn’t just for the holidays, but this CD would make a great gift. Coffee Kids receives a portion of the proceeds on each sale of Music from the Coffee Lands from Putumayo World Music.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Helping Others Has Even More Benefits

I just wanted to throw this story out there. As if helping others wasn’t good enough on its own merits, there’s this (Helping Others Makes You Hot!) too.

Thanks to Janice for the tip!

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Voice from the Field: Pedro Osorio

While visiting our partner CAMPO in Oaxaca, Mexico, I ran into Pedro Osorio. We’d met the previous year when Coffee Kids staff visited the community of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla. The community is located on the side of a mountain in the Chinantla Alta, an area rich in biodiversity with expansive forests, clean water and the perfect altitude for quality coffee. CAMPO has been working with the community for a number of years, but now local committees are taking charge of development in the town.

Pedro Osorio is on the natural resources committee representing six communities in the region working together to protect the area.

“We are currently trying to promote eco-tourism. We built a community hostel for up to 20 people. The idea of this project is for people to see what we do on a daily basis. Some services we offer are tours to visit some of the rare forests, and they are very interesting with waterfalls and springs that you can visit.

“A lot of our children are emigrating to the cities and other countries and we decided not to just sit and cry, but think what can we do to confront this situation. So we are looking for ways to give more opportunity to our children. And we realized the importance of our culture and conservation. For us the principal theme is conservation, that you don’t contaminate your water, don’t degrade the habitat. If you destroy that, you destroy yourself. And there’s a lot of work to be done, but it doesn’t end there, there’s a lot to do.

“The organization CAMPO was the piece that helped us focus our efforts. They gave us the ideas and supported our efforts. They helped us when we first formed a cooperative. And we had problems and failure, but we never stopped. We built a school, there were problems, but we learned and we passed that onto others. A few years back, they’ve let us move on our own, and now we have realized we can do it on our own and CAMPO has moved onto help other communities.

“They perfectly understand the communities, the dynamics. To realize the changes we need, you need to understand, and they really put it together.

“Whenever you want, you should come to visit us in Tepetotutla”

Friday, November 28, 2008

Voice from the Field: Eduardo Torres Navarrete

Eduardo Torres Navarrete is the director of CAMPO, a longtime Coffee Kids partner in Oaxaca, Mexico. The organization recently celebrated 20 years and the opening of a regional training center funded by Coffee Kids (see coverage of the event on our blog). Coffee Kids staff sat down with Torres briefly during the celebration to ask a few questions.

On program development:
“You must say something, you have to start with an idea and when the people say something and it comes from inside the community and they are expressing a want or a need, that’s when it begins. If you don’t question things, if you don’t think, if you don’t imagine, there’s nothing that can move you. But with one word, why does this happen? Why is there poverty? Suffering? Injustice?

“Challenges provoke us to look at what we have. That’s what motivates us, and this is one of the interesting aspects of CAMPO, we are going to experiment. We are going to produce and we are going to demonstrate that these things can be successful. If we don’t believe we can succeed, we have nothing.Unless you start you won’t achieve anything, but these words will guide you and take you where you want to go.”

Advice for other organizations:
“I believe every organization confronts the idea of what you are and what you should be. We should be better, we should be more democratic. The ‘should be’ can become an obligation over time.”

“But what do you want to be? What do you want to be and do? And this is the only suggestion I have, that you do everything that comes to mind. Invent, propose, experiment, fail, and in that way you will move your own development forward. For organizations that are old like us, you must leave your fears. Dare to try new things. Trying something will never fail you. If our organization doesn’t transform, it will die. And we’ve been able to transform over the years. It’s a challenge, its never easy, but it’s necessary.”

On success of programs:
“If you ask CAMPO how many poor people are there after all of these years? Well, there are fewer poor people, but we don’t work for that. We work to give people the power to address what they want to see. We have seen many things happen and we’ve seen people helped. We’ve worked in a lot of ways and lot places.

“We know the radicals, we know the conservative, and we understand those who have no hope. We’ve never tried to work in a box or in a certain way. We have tried to give support to the people to realize their own internal power to develop their community in the way they want to with knowledge and awareness and this is what I believe is the most important.

“The rest is just numbers.”

On their new training center:
“In the mission of CAMPO, we talk about exercising rights. There are many who demand for their rights and look for respect of rights. And we say, let’s stop demanding and demanding and demanding. We need to exercise our rights to health, to housing, to food, to education.

“This training center is an option for the people, an option with open doors. We capture rainwater, we recycle grey water, treatment of water, composting, all sorts of projects. We try to integrate all of them so people can see ways to make it work in their communities. Not every project will work in every community, but here visitors will have a chance to see all of these systems integrated and have the opportunity to find what works, learn from CAMPO and take it back to their communities.

“We have 25 different projects on display here. These projects can be seen in many places, but we’ve brought it all together here in one space. To put it all together and integrate each piece it and open it up to the community so people can come in and see how to do it, this is part of our mission.”

On the support of Coffee Kids:
“In my 20 years with CAMPO, we’ve been fortunate to have the support of a number of organizations. A large organization from Holland helped develop a lot of our programs. And then there is a small organization named Coffee Kids that took the bet on this training center project that no one wanted to fund. We sent it all over to Germany, Belgium. At one point, we weren’t sure how to make it work. But Coffee Kids understands the importance of these demonstration projects.

“Size and amount of money isn’t what is important, it’s what the organization carries inside that can transform the world. Whether or not we succeed or not is not important, but good intent and learning from your challenges is what is important, and, like CAMPO, Coffee Kids understands this.”

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Oaxacan Partner Opens Training Center, Celebrates 20 Years

This past weekend (Nov. 21-23), I traveled down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to attend the 20th Anniversary celebration of Coffee Kids’ partner, CAMPO. They also dedicated their new training center, which they built with support from Coffee Kids.

The new training center teaches by example. It was built using an environmentally-friendly compacted earth technique. Similar to adobe, it involves building molds and compacting dirt to form a solid wall. A water catchment system below the building collects rainfall in two large cisterns. The thick walls keep the building cool in the summer and warm when the temperature drops. CAMPO also has a number of demonstration projects to teach visitors from throughout the state of Oaxaca about organic gardening, permaculture, composting, fish farming, grey water treatment and bee keeping.

Over 800 people attended the celebration. Before dinner was served, I gave a few words about the importance of CAMPO’s work and presented them with a certificate from Coffee Kids on behalf of all of our supporters to honor their work improving the quality of life in the entire region.

After dinner I ran into Pedro Osorio. We’d met a year earlier when Coffee Kids staff visited the community of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla, a far-flung community clinging to a mountainside in the Sierra Mixteca. He told me about their efforts to develop a new cooperative for coffee farmers in the area and a number of their efforts to diversify local income. When we last visited the community, they were working on a small eco-hotel for tourists. Santa Cruz is in the middle of a globally-important nature preserve and many in the community have learned the importance of conserving their natural resources and how it can be marketed to attract tourists. Hope I can get back there for a visit some day.

After dinner, Jose Carlos Leon Vargas and Jose Luis Zarate from our Oaxaca office and I interviewed Eduardo Torres Navarrete, one of the founders of CAMPO. We had a great conversation and it’s easy to understand why CAMPO has been so effective over the past 20 years thanks to his leadership. I’ll be posting excerpts from our interview with him soon.

Thanks to all of our supporters who have make the projects we support possible. These efforts are making a great difference. If you’d like to see more pictures from the event, please visit our Flickr page. If you’d like to support Coffee Kids efforts, Coffee Kids donate page and make your contribution today.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Coffee Kids on Google Earth

Ever wanted to travel to see where Coffee Kids’ partners work? Well, now you can… on your computer. All of Coffee Kids’ partners in Latin America have been posted on Google Earth thanks to help from Winston Rost at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

Simply download Google Earth at http://earth.google.com and install the program on your computer. Then download the link below and double-click it to open up a list of all of Coffee Kids partners. By clicking on the partner’s names, you can see where they are based, get information on how they’re helping coffee-farming families, and find links to photos of their work.

CoffeeKids_2008-2009.kmz

Friday, November 14, 2008

Coffee Kids Announces New Project Partners for 2008-2009

This time of year is always exciting at Coffee Kids. It’s when we announce our project partners for the coming year and begin sending out grants for their programs. We are proud to announce our 12 project partners for 2008-2009. Our partners work in health care, education, microcredit and other community-based programs. This year many have added food security components to address rising food costs. (If you’d like to support these projects, please visit our donate page.)

Many families in coffee-farming communities served by Coffee Kids’ partners cited an almost 100% increase in prices of food staples over the past year. Given increasing populations and the demand for feedstock to produce biofuels, food shortages are affecting people around the world. That means that many of the families served by our partners cannot afford things like education or basic health care since they have to divert almost all of their income to food.

Some of our partners’ efforts include:

• Self-Managed Development (AUGE), a partner working in microcredit and savings programs in Veracruz, Mexico, will educate their members of the current food crisis and encourage the creation of small businesses that provide locally-grown food.


• The Union of Independent Workers of Alianza Property (STIAP) used Coffee Kids funds to expand their biodiesel program in the past year, but will create a permaculture gardening project to supply their community with fresh, organic produce.


• The Association of Northern Cooperatives of Nicaragua (CECOCAFEN) in various parts of Nicaragua will complement their microcredit efforts with a new “Alternative Markets” program to help small business owners commercialize their food products.

Other Coffee Kids partners will address community needs to improve access to education and health care, and diversify local economies for more stable income. All of the programs sponsored by Coffee Kids are created by organizations based in the communities they serve.

For more information on all of our partners and their projects for the upcoming year, please visit our program page! And if you’d like to support these projects, please visit our donate page.

Friday, November 07, 2008

Appropriate Technology Provides Appropriate Solutions

I just read a great article from Popular Mechanics on appropriate technology, or the use of relatively low-tech solutions to solve common problems. For example, there has been a lot of work on creating an affordable laptop, but what would families do with a computer if they have no reliable access to fresh water? The article, “MIT’s Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day,” details a number of creative efforts to help families in developing countries generate energy, process food more efficiently and ensure a supply of clean fresh water.

A lot of these ideas are borne of a true understanding of the challenges faced by impoverished communities. Many people visit developing countries and have a gut reaction to what they see; they return home and try to address the problems without really understanding the needs or wants of the community.

Just like many of the efforts discussed in the article, Coffee Kids works to understand community needs and respects the ingenuity of the people we work with. They are the only ones who really understand what could help improve their quality of life.

Friday, October 31, 2008

All Packed Up and Ready To Go

The boxes are piled up by the door with care and Coffee Kids is ready to move. Today at 2 p.m., we shut down the entire office and finished our preparations. As of Tuesday, Nov. 4, Coffee Kids will be located at 1751 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505 (Google Map of the location).

Please direct all correspondence to this new address and make updates to your address book. We’ve been in the space on Luisa Street for a long time, but as Coffee Kids has grown in the past 20 years, our space needs have grown as well.

We will be planning an open house in the early part of 2009, so keep your eyes open for news. If you have any questions or want to stop by, feel free to contact us at or 505-820-1443.