Thanksgiving Coffee Company

What do you do when your cooperative increases prices by four times? You start a micro-finance project, of course. And not just any micro-finance project: a program that creates the infrastructure for farmers to save money, and incentives them to put aside small amounts of money every other month, for years and years.

The following was written by Wafidi Ahmed, Project Coordinator:

IDA stands for Individual Development Accounts and the general idea is that you encourage people to save by matching the deposit. The ultimate goal is to save enough so we can build wealth through the acquisition of assets, such as land, farming equipment, and education. We decided to start the programme after talking with Ken Schultz, a lawyer and social worker in the United States, and Ben Corey-Moran of Thanksgiving Coffee, who supported the idea of a program that could teach financial literacy to the members and help them use their income to create wealth. For all of us, it seemed to be a perfect fit.

The participants include Muslims, Christians, and Jews. We require that at least 50 percent of the participants are women. We are very eager to expand educational opportunities for women because many women here are forced to leave school at a very young age to help out at home. This is a core goal of the IDA program. For us, education is a very important asset.

In order to grow, the “Grow Through Savings Program” needs additional revenue streams to supply the matching funds. Donations are being channeled through US-based Kulanu.org, and should be sent by check to:

Harriet Bograd, Treasurer
Kulanu, Inc
165 West End Ave, 3R
New York, NY 10023

***Please write “Uganda IDA program” in the comments field online or the memo field of the check.

Chicago. The city’s always been kind of an enigma to me. It’s somewhere between rural Indiana and cosmopolitan Manhattan in my imagination. Each time I visit, it’s a discovery of new layers. Now, the discovery of new stratum is beginning to form a coherent, and exciting kind of geology.

Six months ago, our friends at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston invited us to attend the Hamsa Festival with them. Hamsa is a middle-eastern cultural fair, and the JRC wanted to use the event to reach out to other communities of faith in Chicago. I arrived late Friday night to attend the two-day festival. Elaine Waxman (chief ambassador for our efforts with the JRC) picked me up and whisked me to her home, through the last bits of rain from an unusually strong summer storm.

Our work began Saturday morning, as we arrived in time to set up our booth before the noon festival opening. As I carried boxes of coffee over the wet grass of Lincoln Park, I met Miryam Rashid, who works with the American Friends Service Committee, and who was sharing our booth. Miryam coordinates AFSC’s efforts to build a market for Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil, another project which illustrates of the need for economic development in support of people building sustainable livelihoods as a foundation for peace. What a perfect pairing! I thought to myself, as we began to converse with festival attendees…two examples of how fair trade can connect us to peacemaking around the world!

Through the course of the weekend we met a diverse cross-section of Chicago’s community: young and old, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, religious and agnostic. The organizers of the Hamsa Festival certainly succeeded in building a large tent where everyone felt welcome. Conversations flowed, packages sold, and through the course of the two days, we met a handful of dedicated community activists and organizers who are interested in helping us spread the story of delicious peace.

My hope from the weekend? That we would begin to map out the landscape of interfaith collaboration in Chicago, and plant the seeds for a city-wide interfaith campaign modeled after our efforts in San Francisco. We certainly made a number of these connections, and as we packed up the booth on Sunday night, I thought of the farmers in Uganda, and how the story of their work is slowly spreading from place to place, echoing other efforts to build peace, and inspiring new ones. That distant view I once had of Chicago is starting to come into focus, the landscape of interfaith organizing is starting to come together around this project.

Monday morning I met with the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, an incredible organization, and powerful center of gravity for the emerging interfaith youth movement. As our work with farmers to build a fair trade movement progresses, we find ourselves walking alongside other efforts. Connected by shared values, we find our paths intersecting. The IFYC is one of those new partners, and I look forward to sharing news from their upcoming national conference, where we’ll be presenting a workshop on fair trade, faith, and interfaith action.

If any of you, our dear readers, have suggestions for likely partners in Chicago, please send them our way.

Stay tuned…

Hey everyone. Happy Monday morning!

Just a little update… We are now on myspace.com

Check it out: www.myspace.com/deliciouspeacecoffee

This is just one of the many new projects we are working on to help bridge the gap between you, us, and the farmers.

Enjoy

Holly

Wow. Big news from the land of glamour and glitz; the land of tall canvas folding chairs, fuzzy microphones, and ACTION!

Ellen and Curt’s beautiful documentary Delicious Peace Grows in a Ugandan Coffee Bean has been accepted to both the New York and Los Angeles Independent Film Festivals! These are the premier independent film festivals in the world, and needless to say, competition for screenings is intense. A big congratulation to Curt and Ellen, and their non-profit production company JemGlo. For those of you who haven’t yet seen the trailer, you can watch it online on YouTube. It’s a beautiful telling of the story of “delicious peace” and a testament to the skill, art, and passion of our dear friends Ellen and Curt. As they say in Uganda…webaale nno!

(See the festival’s ad on their website)

(Watch the trailer on YouTube!)

We were both amazed the first time we saw the documentary trailer. There is something about seeing your work captured on film that is surprising; somehow the story seems real in a new way, the complex threads weave together, the dialogue overlaps with the visuals, and condenses a whole world into a powerful distillation.

It’s thanks to Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel, a dynamic husband-and-wife production team, that we have the opportunity to experience our story on film. Curt and Ellen, through their non-profit Jem/Glo, have worked on this film for the past year. Still in mi-production, the films should be complete sometime next year and there is hope for national distribution. Stay tuned for updates.

We arrived on Thursday, after a three hour drive from Ithaca, a few hours before the premiere screening at Temple B’nai Keshet. In addition to being home for Curt and Ellen, B’nai Keshet has for a long time been a supporter of Peace Kawomera, even passing a resolution to only buy this coffee for all synagogue events and functions. That evening, surrounded by the B’nai Keshet community and other supporters, we watched the trailer, and then listened as JJ, joined by his friends Noam Katz and Laura Wetzler, and others from the audience, played an impromptu concert of traditional music from Uganda.

Many thanks to Curt and Ellen for their wonderful hospitality, and for their incredible work. We know that the story of Peace Kawomera is a story of peace, a story that our world needs to know. Their film is helping to share this beautiful story, and through that, we hope, peace.

(Above, Noam, JJ, and Laura make beautiful music)

Winter 2006: Spiritual Uprising

Java Justice
by Dee Axelrod

Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coffee farmers make mirembe kawomera—delicious peace

photo by Paul Katzeff

Mirembe Kawomera coffee delivers a double jolt.

First, there’s the caffeine, but right behind that tang comes the jolt of learning that the arabica beans were sold by an alliance of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ugandan­ farmers.

This unique cooperative in the Mbale region of Uganda is Mirembe Kawomera—Delicious Peace. Their coffee comes to market fairly traded, distributed by Thanksgiving Coffee, a Fort Bragg, California, company specializing in organic and fair trade produce.

By banding together and by establishing a fair trade relationship, the farmers now realize enough profits from sales to meet their families’ basic need­s—a sharp contrast to the hardship of trying to sell as individuals to large corporate buyers in a glutted world market. Better circumstances have, in turn, sweetened relations between the unique Mbale Jewish community and their more numerous Muslim and Christian neighbors.

The notion of forming a coffee cooperative was first conceived by Jewish community leader J.J. Keki as an economic survival tactic. In 1999, a worldwide coffee crisis developed as overproduction in new Brazilian and Vietnamese markets sent prices plummeting. The Mbale farmers were among the many growers who were hurt. Coffee farmers were forced to curtail children’s education so that the youngsters could go to work, or to sell off land their families had cultivated for generations.

In 2004, Keki went door-to-door, encouraging farmers of all faiths to band together. The alliance would be a first; interfaith relations had been strained since the establishment of the Ugandan Jewish community in 1919, when charismatic general Semei Kakungulu and followers converted to Judaism, rather than embrace the Christianity proffered by the British.

“The most serious problem for us is religious prejudice,” Keki said. “In Uganda, a Jew is referred to as a ‘Christ killer.’ Sometimes we have failed job interviews just because we are Jews.” And Muslim Ugandans, says Keki, believe that the Jews have been abandoned by God.

Keki can also recall how his father, during Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, narrowly missed punishment when he was caught studying the forbidden Torah. Fortunately, Keki says, the authorities were willing to accept a bribe of five goats in exchange for his father’s life.

But the history of prejudice would have to become less important than present concerns if the Mbale farmers were to survive in 2004. Keki, who had been supported by Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews, in a successful 2002 bid for a Namanyonyi Sub-County council seat, was widely considered a credible leader. Now, 400 farmers of all three faiths joined to form the coffee cooperative.

“We brainstormed,” Keki said, “and through participatory discussions we came up with the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative.”

The diverse religious groups came together, Keki says, by focusing on what united them.

courtesy Mirembe Kawamera

We looked to common things that were reflected in the holy books,” Keki said. “For example, we all acknowledge that we greet with the word of ‘peace’: shalom, salaam, mirembe.”

The next step was finding a market. Mirembe Kawomera got a break when American vocalist Laura Wetzler intervened. Wetzler learned about the Ugandan jews in the mid-1990s when she heard their Hebrew-African music on public radio.

Wetzler said. “I wrote away and got the tape. I learned all the songs, and I started telling the Abayu­daya’s stories in my concert work.” As coordinator of Kulanu, a Jewish nonprofit organizing community-development projects, Wexler had a mandate to help Mirembe Kawomera find a coffee market. She made 40 phone calls before Thanksgiving Coffee’s CEO, Paul Katzeff, agreed to buy the beans.

Next, Wetzler found a cooperative near Mbale that had already obtained the expensive Fair Trade certification the coffee would need to be sold through Thanksgiving. The Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative would buy farmers’ produce, which would then be processed through the nearby co-op and shipped to California.

Katzeff guarantees the farmers 20 to 40 cents per pound higher return than conventionally traded coffee. That makes their produce dependably lucrative for the farmers. There are other fair trade benefits, as well. Mirembe Kawomera can count on Katzeff’s commitment to an ongoing trade relationship, rather than having to cope with the insecurity of looking for a market each season. And Thanksgiving, like other fair trade buyers, contributes regularly to community development projects in Mbale. Thanksgiving’s contribution of one dollar for every package sold recently helped open and support a school there. The fair trade co-op has been so successful, Keki wants to see it duplicated.

“We hope to make the cooperative a model of championing development in communities,” he said. “We also hope that other cooperatives will emulate the principles of Mirembe and bring about peaceful coexistence. We get along very much
better. You can’t believe the peace and harmony that this community has enjoyed since the cooperative society was formed.”

Dee Axelrod is senior editor at YES!

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=1344