Thanksgiving Coffee Company

Several months ago I received a call from Charles London, a freelance writer who discovered the Peace Kawomera Cooperative after doing some research on the Abayudaya (Jews of Uganda).

“Hello, my name is Charles and I’m interested in writing a story about the Peace Kawomera Cooperative for O Magazine.”

“O, as in Overstock? O, as in Oh? Or O as in Oprah?” I asked. I was in a bit of shock.

Chuckling on the other end, he replied, “Yes, O as in Oprah.”

Thus it started.

I first met Charles at Tufts University. He went to Tufts to celebrate with us as we received the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. He also came to meet our February/March touring delegation, which included 4 farmers from the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. After spending some time together in Boston, Charles joined the farmers, Ben, and me on a bus as we traveled from Boston to NY. On the ride, he interviewed each of the farmers, Ben and me. We had a lot of fun as he got to know us, and we got to know him.

As we continued with the tour, Charles continued on to Uganda. He visited the members of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative, their farms and schools, and learned about the coffee project from the ground. He is a brilliant writer with a good heart.

The end result: a new friendship, and an article in August’s edition of O Magazine. Here is the link: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200808_omag_coffee/1

Sales have been much slower than we hoped for, but many people have called in response to the article with an interest to get involved. Only time will tell, but with the arrival of the new crop just before the article hit, and our new website launched, good things are on our side.

If you read this, please forward it on. Let’s start a new campaign of telling everyone we know about this article and the courageous farmers of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. Encourage your friends to buy a bag or two, and even look into starting a buying club in your community if you haven’t already done so. Together is the only way we can sustain the peace building efforts of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative.

All the best, and have a great weekend!

Holly

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, our work, and fair trade in general is about relationships. When it boils down to it, relationships are what hold this model together and what make it so powerful. Relationships shape this complicated and layered global economic exchange and mold it in the image of community, transform the blind, exploitative, and unsustainable relationships of times past and heal them.

So it’s a great joy to see those relationships deepening, like I have over the past week. Far away, in the east of Uganda, a delegation from the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston (Illinois) is visiting the Peace Kawomera Cooperative.

Our friend Rabbi Brant Rosen has been keeping an account on his blog, Shalom Rav.

Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve written extensively about Mirembe on this blog - largely because I have just been so inspired by the example they set for us. I truly believe that the folks at this modest coop in Uganda are, in their way, showing the rest of the world how to live.

(Brant’s posted a few more times on JRC’s visit to the cooperative, and also on their experience in Rwanda where they are involved with a number of truly inspiring projects…so please take a minute to read backwards and forwards from the link above!)

Also, another member of the JRC delegation, Hannah Gelder, is keeping a blog where she wrote about her experience with Peace Kawomera. Check it out here.

Thanks to our friends at JRC who have made this project such an important part of their community. You’d be hard pressed to find a cup of coffee at their synagogue that’s not fair trade from the farmers of the Peace Kawomera, or make it through a community event without running into someone (probably with the last name Waxman!) hawking packages for people to take home.

And if this sounds exciting, amazing, and fun…why don’t you get your community involved?

Yours in Peace,

Ben

To all our dear supporters & coffee lovers:

So happy to share the good news that after much wait and anticipation, the new crop Ugandan coffee has traversed the Atlantic Ocean, cleared customs, and arrived at our roastery in northern California! AND IT’S DELICIOUS!

The mood when the first of the year’s coffee arrives is kind of like the frenzy around the year’s first Beaujolais. People converge in the tasting room, our head roaster Charles tries to settle everyone down so he can pay attention to the 100 gram sample he’s roasting to perfection, and we all bump into each other waiting for the first cup to brew. It’s inevitably been a long wait, with at least one or two snags in the road, some anxiety, and a good amount of anticipation.

This year’s coffee is the best we’ve had from the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. It’s character (some combination of nutty richness and a strong vanilla and spice note) is enhanced. The light roast is sweet, and almost chocolaty. The dark roast is strong, with a little bit of a smoky punch, and a sweet finish. Hats off to the farmers, who continue to refine their production and quality control mechanism. Quality is the goal of our work, and we’ve put a lot of time in on the ground in Uganda tinkering with fermentation times, drying techniques, sorting, and cupping. See my post from 2006 for more on that story.

We’ve got a little bit more news—the introduction of a re-designed package. We thought we’d wait for the new coffee to introduce it’s new clothes, so here it is:

Director of National Sales and Organizing Holly Moskowitz with a sack of the new coffee, and a package from our first production run.

Yours in Peace (and with some great coffee!)

Ben