Thanksgiving Coffee Company

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

Dear Customers,

Meet Mr. Tondo Eliazali, coffee farmers, and participant in the Peace Kawomera Cooperative’s matched savings program.

(Mr. Tondo, with Elias Hasulube in the background)

“By saving I can prepare for what comes in life. I would like to develop my home—our househould—with first cattle, then goats, and so many things which can benefit the family. My main reason for investing in cattle is for fertilizer for my coffee shamba (farm).”

Visit our Community Development section for more information on the Cooperative’s innovative microfinance program, focused on savings and investment.

Fair Trade mandates that 5 cents of every pound should be dedicated by the producing cooperative to community development. Today I visited Nankusi Elementary school, the local public school, where the cooperative recently provided funds for renovation of the building, and supplements to government-funded staff salaries. It’s absolutely incredible to see that the Cooperative is moving beyond serving only its members, and into a strong social and philanthropic organization in it community—but what’s even more incredible is the connection between the two: the students who attend this school are the children of the members of Peace Kawomera. Peace Kawomera helps to support the school, but it’s the income farmers make from their coffee sales that enables them to pay for their school fees, uniforms, and books. So, this picture of Nankusi Elementary School class P5 (fifth grade), is a picture of fair trade at work in a farming community. This, I think, is what fair trade looks like.